Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf

320 Pages·2005·12.284 MB·English

by  Paul Dresch (editor), James Piscatori (editor)

MONARCHIES
AND NATIONS
Globalisation and Identity
in the Arab States of the Gulf
M O N A R C H I E S
AND
NATIONS
Globalisation and Identity in
the Arab States of the Gulf
Paul Dresch and James Piscatori
Editors
I LONDON,NEW YORK 1
Published in 2005 by 1.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
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www.ibtauris.com
In the United States of America and in Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a
division of St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright 0 2005 Paul Dresch and James Piscatori
The right of Paul Dresch and James Piscatori to be identified as the authors of this
work have been asserted by the authors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 1 85043 971 0
EAN: 978 1 85043 971 4
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Typeset in ES-B8 by A. 8 D. Worthington, Newmarket, Suffolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
CONTENTS
List of Contributors v
Preface vii
Introduction: Societies, Identities and Global Issues
Paul Dresch
PART I. CULTURE AND CONNECTEDNESS
Channels of Interaction: The Role of Gulf-Owned Media Firms in
Globalisation
Naomi Sakr
Dialect and National Identity: The Cultural Politics of Self-
Representation in Bahraini Musa1sal;it
Chve Holes
Cultural Construction, the Gulf and Arab London
Christa Salamandra
PART 11. LOCAL IDENTITIES: THE IMPORTANCE OF NATION-
STATES
Transnational Connections and National Identity: Zanzibari Omanis
in Muscat
Madawi Al-Rasheed
Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy: Citizens,
Expatriates and the Socio-Political System in Kuwait
Anh Nga Longva
Debates on Marriage and Nationality in the United Arab Emirates
Paul Dresch
PART 111. PRACTICAL AND MORAL ORDER
Public Order and Authority: Policing Kuwait
]ill Crystal
Gender, Religious Knowledge and Education in Oman
Mandana E. Limbert
Political Actors Without the Franchise: Women and Politics in
Kuwait
Haya al-Mughni and Mary Ann TPtreault
Managing God's Guests: The Pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia and the
Politics of Legitimacy
jgmes Pisca tori
Notes
References Cited
Index

CONTRIBUTORS
Jill Crystal is Associate Professor in Political Science at Auburn Uni-
versity. She is author of Oil and Politics in the Gulf rulers and
merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (19 90) and Kuwait: the transformation
of an oil state (1992). Her primary research focus has been domestic
politics in the Arab Gulf, and her current work is on the relationship
between general order and maintaining regime-specific order.
Paul Dresch is University Lecturer in Anthropology and Fellow of St
John's College, University of Oxford. He is author of Tribes, Govern-
ment and History in Yemen (1989) and A History of Modern Yemen
(2000) and co-editor with Pierre Bonte and Edouard Conte of Emirs et
Prksidents (2001). His interest in the United Arab Emirates and the
Gulf more generally dates to the mid-1990s.
Clive Holes has been Khalid bin 'Abd~llaha l-Sa'ud Professor for the
Study of the Contemporary Arab World at the University of Oxford
since 1997. He worked for many years in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman,
Algeria and Iraq and has published widely on sociolinguistic change.
He is currently working on a three-volume study entitled Dialect,
Culture and Societyin Eastern Arabia to be published by Brill.
Mandana E. Limbert is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Queens
College, City University of New Yorlc. She has been a Ford Foundation
post-doctoral fellow at New Yorlc University and a Sultan post-doctoral
fellow at Berkeley. Her article, "Senses of Water in an Omani Town",
appeared in Social Text. Her interests include sociality, religion and
modernity in the Arab Gulf.
Anh Nga Longva is Associate Professor in the Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway. She has done extensive
fieldwork in the Gulf (Kuwait and Bahrain) since the late 1980s and
researched on labour migration, ethnic relations, human rights, de-
mocracy and tribalism. Her publications include Walls Built on Sand:
migration, exclusion and society in Kuwait (19 97).
Haya al-Mughni wrote her doctoral thesis at Exeter in 1990 on the
politics of women's groups in Kuwait. She has since published exten-
VI MONARCHIES AND NATIONS
sively and contributed to a number of books on gender politics, citi-
zenship and women's movements. Her most recent publication is
"Citizenship, Gender and the Politics of Quasi-States", with Mary Ann
Titreault, in Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (2000).
James Piscatori is Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and
of Wadham College, Oxford. He was formerly Research Fellow on
Islam and Politics at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and
Professor of International Relations at the University of Wales. He is
the author of Islam in a World of Nation-States (1986) and co-author
with Dale F. Eiclzelman of M u s h Politics (1996).
Madawi Al-Rasheed is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at
King's College, University of London. Her research focuses on history,
society and politics in Saudi Arabia. Her books include Politics in an
Arabian Oasis (19 9 I), Iraqi Assyrian Christians in London (19 98) and
A History of Saudi Arabia (2002). More recently, she has conducted
research in Oman on transnationalism and Omani heritage.
Naomi Sakr, formerly an editor for The Economist Intelligence Unit,
lectures on the political economy of communication in the School of
Media, Art and Design at the University of Westminster. She is the
author of Satellite Realms: transnational television, globalization and
the Middle East (2001) and has written widely on media reform and
development in the Arab World.
Christa Salamandra received a D.Phi1. from the Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University. She has been a Fulbright
Scholar and Visiting Professor of Sociology at the Lebanese American
University in Beirut, and is currently Assistant Professor, Lehman
College, the City University of New Yorlz. Her book, A New Old
Damascus: authenticity and distinction in urban Syria (2004), was
published by Indiana University Press.
Mary Ann Tttreault is Una Chapman Cox Distinguished Professor of
International Affairs at Trinity University in San Antonio. Her books
include The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation and the Economics of the
New World Order (1995) and Stories of Democracy politics and
society in contemporary Kuwait (2000). Her edited volumes include
Partial Truths and the Politics of Commu nity (2003).
PREFACE
T
his volume represents part of the Transnational Communities
Programme of the (UK) Economic and Social Research Council.
All but one of the papers were presented at a worlcshop held at
St John's College, Oxford, in late September 2001. The intention of
this meeting, following the rationale of the broader research pro-
gramme, was to examine the extent to which cross-border connections
- social, political, economic and, importantly, cultural - knitted
together an Arab Gulf community. The conclusions that emerged were
rather different from what might have been expected, and it became
clear to us that when examined "ethnographically" national processes
of affiliation and identification were more important than current
literature suggests.
Transliteration and standardisation of spelling are always difficult,
and we have opted for a combination that presents most Arabic words
and names in the form used by the Internationaljournal of Middle
East Studies, but which uses common English spellings of certain
names and places. Words ending in tz'marbzifah are transliterated as
ah (except in a genitive construction); aw and ay are preferred for the
diphthongs; and long vowels are represented with a macron. The
transliteration of Chapter 2 reflects the specific dialects of Bahrain.
A number of individuals have generously assisted us with the gen-
eral project or this volume in particular: our project colleague, Madawi
Al-Rasheed; Steven Vertovec, director of the overall Transnational
Communities Programme; our research assistants, Christa Salamandra
and Gaelle Le Pottier; Yahya Birt, who produced the figures, and Ali
Parchami, who provided valuable help at several junctures. We have
benefitted as well from the advice and encouragement of several indi-
viduals: Melinda Babcocli, Wendy James, Hassan Abedin, John Gurney
and Nadim Shehadi. Kay McLeary of the Institute of Social and Cul-
tural Anthropology, Oxford, and Christine O'Sullivan of the Oxford
Centre for Islamic Studies were cheerfully efficient in their logistical
and administrative support. We owe all of them, not to mention our
patient contributors, a debt of gratitude.
James Piscatori and Paul Dresch
Oxford, December 2004

INTRODUCTION
SOCIETIES, IDENTITIES
A N D GLOBAL ISSUES
Paul Dresch
T
he Middle East is poorly served by academic literature, and the
Gulf particularly ill served. Nor is the problem confined to
literature in English. Writers in Arabic, most importantly, face
problems gaining critical mass as well of imposed discretion; but the
contrast more generally between the prominence of the Gulf in cur-
rent affairs coverage, as for instance in the London-based af-Wasaf,a nd
its obscurity in more reflective work is striking. As the countries of
the region have taken solid form, indeed, what there was on migra-
tion, the nature of the state and pan-Arab considerations has died
'
away.
In local usage "the Gulf' covers usually the Arab oil monarchies.'
Saudi Arabia is on another scale from its coastal neighbours - the
population, including foreigners, is now in excess of 20 million, while
Qatar and Bahrain are each under 1 million - and in a common
Saudi view such neighbours owe their separate status to Western
imperialism. Oman, by contrast, with a "national" population less
than 2 million, claims a continuity that far precedes Western influ-
ence. Yet Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and Oman, despite the differences between them, are
treated as relatives by their neighbours and citizens. In Arabic the
informal "Gulfy" (khal~~/$'khaf~ihyains )t he common-sense status of
terms such as Shami (a northern Arab) or Maghribi.
The Gulf Co-operation Council, or GCC, which comprises these
six states, was founded in 1981, but a shared position in the world,
and thus a set of common perspectives, is evident which reworks older
patterns of familiarity and runs deeper than immediate decision
making. Part of their shared position is simply that the area is rich in
hydrocarbons. Flows of goods and wealth across national borders are
conspicuous, and local wealth is often felt by Gulf citizens to be
pillaged by outsiders (Fandy 1999: 68, Yamani, M. 2000: 36, 80, 119,
130). Gulf finance itself is implicated in wider patterns, as Naomi Salcr