Download PDF | (Cambridge Middle East Studies) Nelida Fuccaro - Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf_ Manama since 1800-Cambridge University Press (2009).
278 Pages
Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf
In this path-breaking and multi-layered account of one of the least explored societies in the Middle East, Nelida Fuccaro examines the political and social life of the Gulf port city and of its hinterland, as exemplified by Manama in Bahrain. Written as an ethnography of space, politics and community, it addresses the changing relationship between urban development, politics and society before and after the discovery of oil. By using a variety of local sources and oral histories, Fuccaro questions the role played by the British Empire and oil in state-making. Instead, she draws attention to urban residents, elites and institutions as active participants in state- and-nation building. She also examines how the city has continued to provide a source of political, social and sectarian identity since the early nineteenth century, challenging the view that the advent of oil and modernity represented a radical break in the urban past of the region.
nelida fuccaro lectures on modern Middle Eastern history at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Introduction
Why cities and urban history? It is peculiar that urban history has been conspicuously absent from the study of the Arab coast of the Persian Gulf in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, peppered as that region is by a chain of city-states – or quasi city-states – stretching from Kuwait to Oman. The history of cities and urban societies in this region has featured only as a corollary to that of tribes, British Empire and oil. Of course the pivotal role of tribesmen, British officials and oil wealth as agents of historical change can be hardly overstated. Tribal communities constituted the backbone of the political infrastructure of the Gulf coast in the nineteenth century and developed a symbiotic, albeit often conflicting, relationship with the British authorities who controlled the region between 1820 and 1971. British protection ensured the political stability of the local tribal principalities within the new regional order of nation-states which took shape after World War I.
After the 1930s, the discovery of oil gradually transformed the lives of Gulf peoples beyond recognition, altering their social and political identities and their relationship with their living environments. The study of the politics of empire and tribalism, which has been the staple of regional historiography, has imposed a number of constraints on our understanding of indigenous societies and political cultures. External factors have been paramount in explaining historical change through the lens of British influence. The focus on imperial encroachment has also tended to restrict the scope of investigation to those elite groups which came into closer contact with British ‘gunboat diplomats’ (the officials of the Government of India supported by the Royal Navy in their diplomatic pursuits) and imperial administrators, particularly the ruling families and those segments of the merchant classes involved in pearling or European shipping. In parallel, the rich literature on tribes has often contributed to the typecasting of the region as a fragmented political universe.
Traditional ethnographic studies, particularly on the Arabian Peninsula, have often reproduced the Orientalist clichés first publicised by travellers and colonial officials who visited and described the region in the early twentieth century. Discussing tribal and religious authority in the Yemen, R. B. Serjeant famously wrote: ‘As each tribe … is an independent unit, tribal Arabia is to be conceived of as normally in a state of anarchy.’ 1 More recently, ethnographers, anthropologists and historians have discussed tribes either as state makers, forces opposed to state centralisation, or as the building blocks of social and political cohesion at the local level.
Historical anthropologists, in particular, have presented a nuanced picture of tribal societies by engaging with the multiform manifestations of kinship solidarities across time and space: from the states which emerged in Central Arabia after the eighteenth century to the pearling communities of Trucial Oman (since 1971 the United Arab Emirates) in the 1950s.2 Without losing sight of tribal folk and imperial politics, this study shifts the context of investigation to urban milieus and to port towns and oil cities in particular. In drawing a composite picture of political and social life in Manama and in the islands of Bahrain, it explores the city as an organic entity and as the point of intersection of the political, social and cultural universe of the Gulf coast. Before oil, mercantile port towns such as Manama, Dubai and Kuwait provided the interface between their tribal and agricultural hinterlands, and the cosmopolitan world of trade which gravitated around the Gulf waters. In the oil era, regional ports were transformed into capital cities and showcases of modernisation.
Their development epitomised the making of a new oil frontier populated by modern entrepreneurs, consumer goods and oil companies. Revisiting the history of port towns and oil cities also responds to contemporary concerns. In the last decades or so, the manipulation of the region’s urban past has acquired an increasing relevance in the practices of legitimacy promoted by Gulf governments. Efforts on the part of the ruling families to enforce political consensus among national populations gathered momentum in the various countries of the region after they achieved independence from British control between 1961 and 1971. Accordingly, Gulf metropolises have become instruments of statecraft, tools to promote state formation.3 Since the 1990s, the historical centres of Dubai, Kuwait and, to a lesser extent, Manama have been gradually transformed into spaces which embody a new idea of ‘homogenous’ national culture and political community.
The recuperation of pre-oil urban traditions and settings and the establishment of national museums have set in motion a movement of heritage revival (ihya’ al-turath) which constitutes the most tangible manifestation of state-sponsored nationalism in the region. Historical sites and natural harbours have become recreational, educational and tourist spaces emphasising the tribal and Arab character of pre-oil Gulf societies, often to the detriment of their cosmopolitan traditions. The Dubai Heritage Village established in 1996 in the old harbour of the city includes replicas of its old quarters, spaces for folklore performances and the reconstruction of a diving village with miniatures of pearling boats. Since 1998, when the village was officially transformed into a living museum (mathaf hayy), it has become a venue where ‘cultural representations and displays are organized, thematized and presented to viewers as discourses of Emirati national culture’. 4
As an integral part of the teleological narrative of legitimacy promoted by ruling families, historic towns have also become the symbols of loyalty or opposition to contemporary Gulf regimes. Old Muharraq – the capital of the Al Khalifah administration of Bahrain in the nineteenth century – still evokes and reinforces allegiance to the ruling family among Bahrain’s Sunni population. The celebrated historical novel Mudun al-Milah (‘Cities of Salt’) by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Munif expresses the author’s dissent by presenting a powerful and imaginative political geography of the early modern oil city, a neocolonial city shaped since the 1940s by the international oil economy. Munif’s literary representation of the fragility and ephemeral nature of Harran, a fictional oil town in Saudi Arabia, is a critique of the coercive power of the neo-tribal governments which emerged in the early oil era in collusion with American imperialism and the nascent oil industry.5
By focussing on the displacement of an urbanised Bedouin community, the author also gives a voice to the social malaise and political insubstantiality of large segments of Gulf societies. In an equally subversive message, some Gulf intellectuals have used the demise of the pluralistic civic tradition and cosmopolitan culture of port towns as a symbol of the violation of cities and urban lives by oil and modernity. The tolerant milieus of pre-oil Kuwait Town and Manama have been often contrasted with the forced policies of ‘Arabisation’(and in the case of Kuwait City also ‘Bedouinisation’) enforced by the Al Sabah and Al Khalifah families.
In the United Arab Emirates, these processes have also become apparent in recent decades but have so far not aroused dissident voices.6 In a similar vein, the Kuwaiti sociologist Khaldun alNaqeeb sees the metropolitan oil city as the personification of the authoritarian state, the ghetto of a ‘decrepit lumpenproletariat’. 7 Such caustic criticism echoes the bitter contestation over thorny issues of citizenship and of political and economic entitlements on the part of disenfranchised groups such as the bidun (indigenous communities without passport), second-class citizens and immigrant labourers. Without accepting at face value this idealised portrayal of the pre-oil era, it is beyond doubt that the intervention of the oil state profoundly transformed the fluid trans-national character of Gulf ports. In the case of Manama this transformation is striking. As will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 6, since the 1950s the emergence of political and legal divisions between citizens (al-muwatinun), expatriate communities and migrant workers contrasts starkly with the open milieus which characterised the mercantile settlement of the nineteenth century.
The question of how historic port towns and their populations were bequeathed to modern oil states features prominently in this study of Manama. As shown by the literature on the post-Ottoman world, the notion of ‘imperial legacy’ offers a key to understanding the historical roots of the states and urban societies which emerged in the Middle East after World War I. Philip Khoury and James Gelvin, for instance, have demonstrated how the politics of urban notables and popular nationalism provided a crucial element of continuity in the political infrastructure of Damascus between Ottoman and French rule and shaped the outlook of the city as the new capital of the Syrian state in the interwar period. In a similar vein, Jens Hanssen’s study of urbanism in fin de siècle Beirut sets out to challenge the dichotomy between the Ottoman and French imperial histories of the city.8 It is true that European imperialism and state building in the Gulf followed a different trajectory. Yet, particularly in Bahrain, the remarkable longevity of British informal empire (which lasted some 150 years) was instrumental in maintaining the urban and tribal elites of the pre-oil era in power as the ‘natural’ leaders of their populations. With oil revenue and British support, the Al Khalifah of Bahrain – in much the same way as the Al Sabah of Kuwait and the Al Maktum of Dubai – were able to refashion their profile as the political elites of the oil state, providing a term of comparison with the postOttoman Arab world, at least in the period between the two World Wars. This study develops this comparison by focussing on the politics of notables in Manama and on the role played by the municipality in upholding their position in the oil era. In the first place, the absence of a comparative agenda in the study of Gulf towns and cities stems from the very limited interest in the region on the part of urban specialists. Historians have often been discouraged by the apparent ‘exceptionalism’ of the historical experience of the Gulf coast.
The scarcity of local records and the seemingly ‘obfuscated’ historical memory of Arab Gulf societies have undoubtedly played a major role, as if oil modernisation had swept away urban history along with the traditional urban landscapes. Among specialists of the Muslim world in particular, this attitude is also reinforced by a general bias towards the study of ‘lesser cities’, urban centres which do not conform to normative ideas of Islamic urbanism in the same way as the capitals and provincial centres of Muslim Empires: Cairo, Delhi, Istanbul, Damascus and Aleppo, to name a few.9 Moreover, the little attention devoted to the urban history of the Arab Gulf States (including Saudi Arabia) is partly a symptom of the effects of the ‘modernist’ and ‘state-centric’ paradigm which has permeated the study of the region, the brainchild of the modernisation literature produced in the 1950s and 1960s. In focussing on the evolution of the state in oil-producing countries, this literature not only portrayed state formation as following a Western model of development but also construed it as an irreconcilable break with the past.10 As social anthropologists would put it, the oil era was typecast as a process exemplifying the sudden withdrawal of ‘tradition’ in the face of ‘modernity’, contributing to dissociate processes of city formation from the cumulative experience of change over the long durée of regional history.
The dependency approach that has dominated the study of the political economy of oil countries since the 1970s has reframed the developmental process under the rubric of ‘rentierism’, with an emphasis on oil income as an externally generated source of state revenue.11 Yet, with the exception of the studies by Jill Crystal on Kuwait and Qatar and by Fuad Khuri on Bahrain, what we often miss from these accounts is the historical perspective which should underpin the study of oil development.12 One of the additional pitfalls of the ‘rentierist’ approach is the emphasis placed upon the preponderant role played by the world economy over the Gulf ‘periphery’. This emphasis has led scholars to view politics and economics through the lens of global processes and thus often to underplay historical and regional specificities.13 In examining further the limitations of the ‘rentierist’/dependency approach, it must be simply noted that it has not been concerned with urban issues. Even studies on the Oil City, which to some extent draw on this approach, promote an ‘essentialist’ view of urban development with poor conceptual elaboration and limited empirical substance.14
A line of enquiry which seems to have much resonance for the study of urbanisation in the Arab Gulf is that pioneered by Anthony King who has opened new ways of investigating continuities in the evolution of ‘colonial’ and ‘world’ cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.15 First, this approach links the development of non-Western cities to the long durée of the world global economy, broadening considerably the scope for research on Gulf urbanism encompassing the period before and after the discovery of oil. Secondly, it focusses on the ‘language’ of urbanisation, that is, on how processes such as colonialism, imperialism, modernisation and development became ‘concretized in the built environment’. 16 Although the port towns and oil cities of the Persian Gulf were not colonial creations and do not conform to the definition of ‘world’ city (with the notable exception of Dubai),17 they deserve attention as the physical embodiment of historical processes, more so in the light of the dramatic transformations of their cityscapes over the last two centuries. In spite of the heuristic potential of the macro-economic approach pioneered by King, this study of Manama between 1783 and 1971 is not underpinned by an analysis of the changes in the world economy.
Primarily conceived as a history of urban space, politics and community, it uses regional and international trends as a backdrop: the resurgence of tribal power across Asia and the Arabian Peninsula in the eighteenth century, British political and commercial expansion in the long nineteenth century, internationalism and state building after World War I, the consolidation of the international oil economy, particularly after 1945 and, last but not least, the demise of the British Empire in India and in the Middle East. Yet, to some extent King’s ‘language’ of urbanism has provided inspiration for this urban history which is partly concerned with the transformation of urban spaces and how key players such as state, tribe, empire, oil and modernisation intersected with them.
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