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Tribal Modern The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. Tribal Modern Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf miriam cooke university of california press Berkeley Los Angeles London University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www .ucpress .edu . University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, En gland © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Cooke, Miriam. Tribal modern : branding new nations in the Arab Gulf / Miriam Cooke. pages cm ISBN 978- 0- 520- 28009- 0 (hardback)— ISBN 978- 0- 520- 28010- 6 (paperback) 1. Ethnology— Persian Gulf States. 2. Persian Gulf States— Social life and customs. 3. Tribes— Persian Gulf States. I. Title. GN640.C66 2014 306.09536—dc23 2013019649 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post- consumer fi ber paper that is FSC certifi ed, deinked, pro cessed chlorine- free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid- free and EcoLogo certifi ed. For Muhammad Àli Àbdullah and DD This page intentionally left blank contents Introduction 1 1. Uneasy Cosmopolitanism 16 2. Pure Blood and the New Nation 30 3. The Idea of the Tribe 50 4. The Brand 64 5. Building the Brand 77 6. Heritage Engineering 99 viii / Contents 7. Performing National Identity 123 8. Gendering the Tribal Modern 138 Conclusion 163 Acknowledgments 175 Notes 177 References 197 Index 207 Introduction Bombay. February 1973. I was running out of money. After months on the road, I was tired of traveling. Busing and hitching across Eu rope through Turkey to Afghan i stan through the Khyber Pass and Rawalpindi to Katmandu and down to Goa for Christmas and Trivandrum for New Year’s Eve had fi nally slaked my wanderlust. Instead of Bali, I decided to return to Bombay and then home. Home in oh- so- far- away En gland. With little money left, my only option was the “human cargo ship.” These vessels of misery left Bombay when they had fi lled 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 fi lling 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 Irani an port of Khorramshahr. Before setting sail, I signed a doc- ument accepting the conditions of travel: no doctor on board. 1 2 / Introduction 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 fi fty 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 Rus sian hospital. It was highly recommended, and so I joined a couple of the sailors who were on their fi rst trip to the Gulf. The car wound its way through the streets and then quickly out into the desert. There Introduction / 3 it was, a large, glass, empty edifi ce. Rumor had it that those who entered did not leave alive. We kept our distance. Bleak and colorless though it was, Dubai had seemed uncan- nily familiar. • • • Dubai. December 2008. About to land in Dubai International Airport, I wondered if I would again experience those intimations of a previous incarna- tion. Flying over the city, I knew I wouldn’t. I entered the huge, glass airport that serves as one of the busi- est hubs in the world. Teeming with people, it felt like Heath- row 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 mon- strous 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 traffi c 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 4 / Introduction 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 bus- tling hive of activity where I had landed all those years ago. Bastakia’s romantic wind towers and hushed, narrow lanes fl anked by high, white, windowless walls allowed the imagina- tion 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 briefl y 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 Kato- drytis 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 21st century: prosthetic and nomadic oases presented as isolated cities” (Kato- drytis 2005, 42, 43). Dubai, like the six other emirates of the United Arab Emir- ates (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- fi ve years earlier. Dubai has become the icon of a world in transition. With a population that has increased twentyfold and skyscrap- ers 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 Lam- Introduction / 5 borghinis; falcon markets and indoor ski slopes; camping in the desert and Jeeps “bashing” dunes. Beyond the endless pursuit of fun and profi t, 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 fi shing and pearl- ing shaikhdoms made destitute in the early twentieth century by competition with the Japanese cultured pearl industry, ultra- modern 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 fl ows of people, goods, and capital.

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