Abstracts
Assimilative Wahhabism: How Did the Saudi State Institutionalize Wahhabism in Its Nation-Building Process?
Sultan Alamer (George Washington University)
How did the Wahhabi movement transform from being a small minority group in the Arabian Peninsula to constitute the majority of the population in Saudi Arabia? Although it is widely acknowledged in the literature dealing with nation building that such a process produces co-nationals, minorities, and refugees, the studies on nation building in Saudi Arabia have exclusively focused on the production of minorities (e.g. Shia). In an effort to fill this gap, this paper attempts to investigate how the Saudi state adopted assimilative policies in its nation-building process to create co-nationals in the early twentieth century. More specifically, this paper will investigate the institutionalization of Wahhabism as an assimilative function rather than strictly a tool of exclusion. To this end, I examine the integration of the populations of the Southern regions of the kingdom as an example of institutionalizing Wahhabism as an assimilative tool. The paper will also consider how such assimilative processes interacted with, and were incorporated into, these regions, thus highlighting the agency of those on the receiving end of such assimilative efforts. By doing so, the study will go beyond the commonly held assumptions about the strictly exclusionary nature of the introduction of Wahhabism into Saudi Arabia. It will also challenge rentier state theory’s socio-economic explanations of state-society relations. Instead, it will also highlight how this process was used in assimilative attempts “from above” as well as adoption “from below.”
State Making and Its Discontents: Political Mobilizations and Regional Rivalries in Saudi Arabia
Rosie Bsheer (Yale University)
Saudi Arabia, like other states in the Middle East and North Africa, has witnessed its share of popular political activism since the early twentieth century. Indeed, inhabitants of the diverse regions that have constituted the territory of the Saudi state since its formation in 1932 were neither apolitical nor isolated from the region’s widespread socio-political trends, as the conventional literature would have us believe. Rather, similar to other citizens in the region, inhabitants of the fledgling Saudi state held on to political, social and economic aspirations derived from the experience of modernity, the emergence of the post-Ottoman state system, and early twentieth-century socio-political changes. They formed popular mobilizations that varyingly co-opted the language of freedom, independence and social justice to fight against authoritarianism, imperialism, or both. As a matter of fact, anti-colonialism, Arab nationalism, and various leftist ideologies deeply influenced the people as well as the government of mid-century Saudi Arabia. Yet these mobilizations, the attendant intra-regime rivalries, and the counterrevolutionary responses deployed against them led to the consolidation of a politically reactionary, religiously conservative, authoritarian monarchy in the late 1960s, one that has since been the target of diverse oppositional politics.
Oasis, Coast, and Mountain: Landscapes of History and Culture in the UAE and Oman
Steven C. Caton (Harvard University)
In a triangle comprising the United Arab Emirates, the Musandam Peninsula, and the Hajjar Mountains (Al-Jabal Al-Akhdhar), one can find the three landscapes that predominate in the Arabian Peninsula: desert oasis, coast and port cities, and mountains and their terraces. (Though similar landscapes exist elsewhere, the proximity of these three in this corner of the Peninsula makes them particularly convenient to study). Each of these landscapes has its own natural, socio-cultural, and historical character, but none has existed in isolation from the others, and the paper will trace both their changing distinctiveness and connectedness over time. Both ethnography and history will be employed to help us understand this dynamic, and various theoretical notions of landscapes will be presented to help sharpen the analysis. The ultimate question is: to what extent are these landscapes “sustainable,” and what that might even mean and how might it be answered (if it can)?
Iqbal and the Yemeni Revolution: Muhammad al-Zubayri in Pakistan
John Willis (University of Colorado, Boulder)
The history of Yemen’s 1948 revolution is often narrated as a politically immature expression of the authentic nationalist and Arabist revolutionary forces that successfully overthrew the imamate in 1962. In this narrative the diasporic and exilic lives of Yemeni activists and intellectuals in the greater Arab world have been considered essential to the cultivation of an Arab nationalist revolutionary culture and a Yemeni nationalist movement. The exilic life of Muhammad Mahmud al-Zubayri, considered one of Yemen’s foremost revolutionary poets, in Pakistan (1948-1952) has been curiously overlooked. In what ways did this period of residence in a self-identified post-colonial Islamic state frame his later engagement of the Yemen issue? And in particular, in what ways did his discovery of the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, considered the poet-philosopher of Pakistan, inform his understanding of Yemeni revolutionary politics? In this paper I will consider Zubayri’s period of exile through the critical dyad of translation/transnation to consider the mediating effects of Pakistan/Iqbal on the Yemeni revolution.
Quartermasters of Capital
Laleh Khalili (SOAS, University of London)
In this paper, I will be examining two different facets of the entanglements of war-making and capital accumulation in the making of the transport infrastructures of the Arabian Peninsula. The first facet focuses on the corporate structures engaged in commodity extraction and their overlap with domains of sovereign authority, including the exercise of coercive power. I will argue that among the companies that were from very early on involved in the making of maritime transport infrastructure, have been these extractive corporations (of oil and gas, but also other minerals) and among them there have been several distinct models of corporate ownership prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula in the twentieth century. The two most prevalent models have been those represented by the companies that eventually became ARAMCO and BP (or the latter’s subsidiaries). What is noteworthy (and profoundly influential in the making of infrastructures) is the extent to which these corporate models have, despite their differences, been engaged in extraction of commodities following well-established colonial models, and have been given not only sovereign authorities by the countries in which they are headquartered, but have had significant operational and strategic overlaps with the militaries of those countries – specifically in the domain of transport and infrastructure construction.
The second facet of the entanglements of war and trade has been the centrality of the labour of workers whose enclosure/expropriation/expulsion from their countries of origin, because of war or shifts in global patterns of trade, has been crucial to the literal forging of these extractive/infrastructural industries. Here, war and geopolitics are not always the primary drivers for the provision of exploitable, deportable, precarious labour, but in certain periods are crucial factors (other decisive factors are global shifts in the patterns of capital accumulation and the mosaic of politico-economic shifts sometimes labelled as “neoliberalism”). The mass movement of Palestinians to the Arabian Peninsula in the aftermath of 1948 (and again 1967) was absolutely central to the building of roads, rail, and ports in the region (as well as the construction of offshore facilities). The geopolitics of Israel/Palestine conflict after 1948 was also a notable cause of labour unrest on the docks of the Arabian Peninsula, leading to planning by the British masters of shifts in the sources for labour (from the Arab world to South Asia) in order to avoid such labour and political unrest.
These political shifts ultimately indicate that it is so very often not the logic of the market or the grand vision of great men that shape the transformational landscapes of infrastructures but war, trade, and mass movements of populations of migrants and refugees.
The Imperial Liberal University: The Making of an US Enclave in Abu Dhabi
Pascal Menoret (Brandeis University)
New York University Abu Dhabi, created in 2008 in the UAE, is part of NYU’s project of a global university spanning several continents, with campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai, and study sites in a dozen cities across the world, from Paris to Accra, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv. NYU Abu Dhabi presents itself as a unique enterprise that sets out to change the world by educating new generations of cosmopolitan pioneers and leaders. My paper examines this exceptionalist claim by looking at NYU Abu Dhabi’s physical presence in the Emirati capital, at its insertion into its urban and suburban surroundings, and at the history of US enclaves around the Arabian Peninsula.
If – to quote Edward Said – “imperialism is the export of identities,” are US universities abroad condemned to be imperial institutions? Is NYU Abu Dhabi an imperial liberal university, i.e. an institution that, through its missionary claim to make the world a better place, is aiming at legitimizing US presence overseas? I investigate this question by looking at the geography of NYU Abu Dhabi on a local and a global scale: the space of the campus, the space of the city, and the intercontinental space between campuses. In the paper I combine urban history and social anthropology, and I use Emirati and international archives, fieldwork findings, and my personal experience teaching at NYU Abu Dhabi between 2011 and 2015.
The paper examines the suburban setting of NYU Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island, off the main island of Abu Dhabi, in relation to the urban history and the geography of the city. How does the checkpoint regime implemented by the university and characterized by fragmentation and constant monitoring relate to citywide and international strategies of control and repression?
It then investigates the declared project of the university to gradually modify labor practices in the UAE and to “lead by example.” The claim to try and reform “local” labor policies through best “international” practices obscures the colonial and neocolonial history of labor relations in the Arabian Peninsula. The Kafala system in particular, which binds labor migrants to their employers and is often blamed on a “local culture” of exploitation, was in reality created by British and US oil companies to bypass postcolonial governments and better control labor. The paper examines how corporate power and police repression did not recede, but actually increased as a result of reform efforts.
Finally, the paper shows how NYU Abu Dhabi fits in the history of US enclaves in and around the Arabian Peninsula, from early Christian missions to the Saudi oil company Aramco and to the Diego Garcia military base. What does it mean to create a US liberal university in the Middle East at the time of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?
Fun at the Fair: Building Dubai’s Rashid Hospital
Todd Reisz, Yale University
This text is currently formulated as a draft chapter of a manuscript about Dubai’s urbanization between 1957 and 1979. It explores the development of Rashid Hospital which was completed in 1972. Before Rashid Hospital, Dubai’s first healthcare facility resulted from a weary amalgamation of half-hearted charitable efforts over the two previous decades. In stark contrast, Rashid Hospital was approached as a fast-track architectural project. Fully financed by Dubai’s ruler, the hospital was described by one of its makers as a “one-line remit” to the government’s British advisers. Through an exploration of recoverable details, the accuracy of such a statement is explored within the economic environment in which the hospital came about. The ambitions for the hospital coincided with the increasing presence of British consultancies and industries readily available to ensure the new hospital’s “international standards.” More than a heightened locale of modern hygiene, the hospital signaled how other parts of the city would be developed thereafter.
“Mixed” Meanings: Co-education, Feminisms, and Negotiations of Qatari National Femininity in Education City
Neha Vora (Lafayette College)
This paper is based on a chapter of my manuscript in progress, Teach for Arabia: American universities, liberalism, and transnational Qatar. The chapter builds on my exploration of how Qatari students experience American education by focusing on how the category of “Qatari woman” and the parameters of “proper” national femininity are produced within Education City. In conceiving Education City as the hallmark of Qatar’s knowledge economy, both the state and Qatar Foundation adopted the connections between co-education and civilizing mission that the liberal university has naturalized. However, gender-integrated education, colloquially referred to as “mixing,” is both imperative and impossible: the Qatari state considers women’s education and employment within mixed workplaces essential to becoming modern, to transitioning to a knowledge-based economy, and to achieving greater Qatarization. Yet, gender integration is also considered a threat to women’s bodily purity, reputation, and to the gender roles and norms attached to Qatar’s emergent national identity. The overt and covert ways that co-educational anxiety permeates Education City play out on the bodies and actions of Qatari women in particular, both as a group to be protected from criticism, and as the source of gender threat itself.
Through my interviews and interactions with Qatari female students, I explore how they navigated the gender “threat” of Education City and produced and performed “proper” national femininity by drawing on a variety of often contradictory expectations of behavior and discourses of power and choice. Tasked with playing a critical role in Qatar’s modernization, but also expected to represent a timeless national culture, young Qatari women were constantly negotiating competing expectations and parameters of what constituted proper femininity. Despite a range of challenges they faced entering and staying in college, they overwhelmingly experienced the branch campus as a space of freedom and empowerment. Were they rehearsing liberal feminism as part of the production of their identities and forms of empowerment within these institutions, or might what appears to be liberal feminist discourse actually include other visions of personal and national futures, ones that in fact contradict the very political stakes that liberal feminist ideology promotes? I argue that Qatari women’s emergent and contested assemblages of Qatari femininity reproduced national distinction and ethno-national exclusions, even as they provided opportunities to challenge existing social hierarchies around gender and citizenship. The narratives and performances by Qatari women resist an easy mapping onto the entrenched Western feminist teleology of gender “liberation,” and onto naturalized understandings of conservative vs. progressive.