The following is reprinted with permission from Religion Dispatches. You can sign up for their free daily newsletter here.
The Arabian Peninsula’s monarchies remind me of five hundred years ago. Seriously.
Back when Muslims and Arabs had a major part to play in the Indian Ocean economy, a huge market crisscrossed by commerce they sustained and often extended. Today these monarchies enjoy more stability and success than neighboring republics (perhaps excepting Turkey); they suggest that non-modern forms of loyalty can outdo the Arab political modern. I’d even argue that the Gulf Cooperation Council, or GCC, which links these monarchies, has a serious chance of becoming one of the leadership poles of Arab and Muslim states. But to get to there, many challenges must be met; these challenges will be amplified by the expectations Arab and Muslims will have of Gulf Arab states; sometimes positioning oneself at the center leaves one pulled in every directions.
Several Billion Arab Barrels of Oil
We are in the midst of an unclear global transition, and Foley’s The Arab Gulf States: Beyond Oil and Islam should be seriously considered for its smart explanation of how the Arab Gulf has come to play the world role it does. Foley provides an approachable, interconnected and closely researched survey of the Gulf’s recent history, correctly observing that the region’s strengths and weaknesses are older and more complicated than we might assume. For that achievement alone, Foley’s book deserves the best praise an aspiring academic might hand off: This could easily be a textbook. About all it seriously lacks, though this is no petty absence, are maps. (Why?)
Foley does an especially good job describing Gulf Arab society. While he refutes common stereotypes, he doesn’t shy away from honest expositions of present predicaments. He explains the unkind 1990’s without pulling punches. With cheap labor flooding the region, the monarchies could continue avoiding the problem of underqualified natives demanding generous social services against oil receipts. Since the monarchs’ legitimacy hinged on providing for their citizens, such wealthy leaders could not plausibly cast their citizens into an unsubsidized competition against hungrier or more educated populations.
When oil prices slumped and al-Qaeda terrorism surfaced in Saudi Arabia, some wondered if this might be the end of the GCC as we knew it. (Though, as Foley intriguingly points out, as Arab republics go—Yemen, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—maybe monarchies are the saner option.) But the Dubai model popped up as first interruption and then salvation. Dubai inspired the GCC to find a different way of using its wealth to find stability and non prosperity. Foley does show how Dubai is both continuous with and disruptive of patterns in Arab Gulf states, and is nimble enough to suggest how creatively the GCC states have sought to deal with their problems.
But sometimes Foley allows his more rigid vision of the world to intrude on his academic approach. That takes something special from his project. In The Arab Gulf States, Foley defines hijab as a “traditional symbol of patriarchy,” although he doesn’t square this frankly dated judgment with his own observations. The increased observance of hijab goes with increasingly well-educated, professionally motivated Gulf women, far outpacing the men who allegedly dominate them sartorially (but not intellectually?). We are past the idea—hopefully, at least—that any recurrence of religion is retrograde, and what a symbol meant in one place or era is what it must mean in other contexts.
Sometimes Foley tries far too hard to change our picture of the Gulf. Describing the oil giant Aramco’s entrance into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Foley writes: “Building on a tradition of Saudi-Wahhabi tolerance of religious minorities, the company won the right for its employers to practice Christianity in the kingdom…” This “tradition of Saudi-Wahhabi tolerance”—many Muslims take issue with such a description. I’m not even sure “Saudi-Wahhabi” ulama would so describe their interpretive perspective. (One of the problems in their interpretation is the denial of perspective.)
Toleration in today’s Gulf is a product of rapid industrialization colliding with past practices of cosmopolitanism. Before oil, the Gulf’s diverse populations were in many places hierarchically organized and separated by religion (less frequently, by ethnicity). To call the re-creation of segregated communities tolerance is to stretch the sense of tolerance without historicizing it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t alternate practices of tolerance, but once more we should be careful not to blur how something works in one place with how it works in another.
Saudi Arabian Airlines Killed The Last Caliph
That said, I found myself agreeing with Foley: There’s a lot more to the Gulf than oil and Islam. But his “more” projects backwards, whereas I’m interested in what the Arab Gulf might become. My sense is that Islam will shape the Arab Gulf in surprising ways, even though Islam will not be the only determinant of that future. My prediction turns how the economic echoes of Gulf practices and broader financial empowerment create new forms of expectation. The GCC is after all rather central to Islam—geographically and religiously. But a democratization of Muslim identity acting on and coming from the region will make the GCC still more central.
Consider how unique the Arab Gulf is to the Muslim-majority world. While we’ve recently seen Dubai stumble, the Emirate isn’t going anywhere. In 2006, Dubai attracted more passengers to its international airport than London’s Heathrow, Frankfurt, and Pariscombined. It’s the only accessible global city—besides Istanbul—with world-class infrastructure between Morocco and Malaysia. As the middle classes in the 10/40 window balloon in size, they’ll look for a model. In many ways, Dubai should not and cannot be that example. But Dubai has irrevocably leaked into the Peninsula: the city hosts the elegantly ethereal Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building; right behind Mecca’s Great Mosque rises the world’s second tallest, Abraj al-Bayt.
This centrality is also virtual. Qatar’s al-Jazeera has become an obvious meeting point, a global brand that has changed news broadcasting worldwide. (How many Muslim products can say that?) It’s not new for Arabs and Muslims to try to control communication between themselves; al-Jazeera, however, irreversibly raised expectations—like Dubai, it’s world-class. Even terrifying. On one occasion, the channel so threatened the Algerian government that it cut power to Algiers rather than risk its citizens watching a particularly damning report.
The channel has done all this, and reconfigured the mental map of the Muslim mind: Think hard about Al Jazeera’s choices for time zone, Greenwich Mean Time and Mecca time. A news channel to counter foreign media, recognizing international Western standards—and expectations—but also scheduling itself around Islam’s religious center. Every year now, more Muslims can see their holy places live, moving the Muslim sacred into your living room or smartphone. It’s like Al Jazeera expected and facilitated that.
Mecca may be still more prominent in the changing identities of Muslims worldwide.
Foley does a great job explaining how the hajj became a means for the House of Saud to contest Ottoman primacy (a past rivalry significantly complicated by the rise of Sunni Turkey and Sunni Arab fears of Shi‘i Iran – a twist of geopolitics that Foley does not address). It was enormously significant, for bragging rights, legitimacy and sacred leadership, to control entry into Jeddah, to be able to say after centuries of imperialism that Muslims could and would bring Muslims to Islam’s holy sites—a post-colonial moment effected by a power most associate with a pre-colonial mindset:
In 1983, [Saudi Arabian Airlines] was carrying more than 10 million passengers per year… facilitated the growth of the Hajj pilgrimage from 50,000 in 1933 to 400,000 in 1970 and more than a million in 1983. Thanks to jet aircraft and US assistance, Riyadh could attest that it achieved in 20 years with the Ottoman Empire and its Hijaz railroad had been unable to achieve in more than a century: total Muslim control over all transportation routes to the Hajj pilgrimage. Where Do We Put All These Turks?
This March, I joined a group of American Muslims on a minor pilgrimage (‘umrah) to Mecca. Among the many impressions that stuck with me were the great number of Turkish pilgrims. Many were middle-class Anatolians, ciphers for the rise of a new republican identity, pious and capitalist. It occurred to me, as I was eyeing the bulldozers making way for more skyscraper hotels and people-moving monorails: As more Muslims move into the middle class, the effect they will have on Saudi Arabia will be tremendous.
Already, the Kingdom plans to make the holy cities greener, cleaner, smarter and safer. (This May 2nd, 2010, for example, a day-long conference on transport and crowd management took place in Jeddah). In this project, the GCC’s relationship to Iran, America and the wider world will be a sizable consideration, for the ability to travel to the holy cities is a common Muslim concern. These pilgrims will surely ask (as I did) “Why doesn’t Jeddah’s airport run as smoothly as Dubai’s?” Is it because the latter is for non-Muslim foreigners? What about Muslims, especially non-Arabs?
A middle-class vision of Islam might seem boring, but it will in fact become tremendously upsetting to established practice. As more Muslims can afford the journey, more will demand to come. How will these Muslims relate to Saudi control over the holy cities? Where will they stay? How many will be allowed to visit at any one time? How will they demand accommodations—because they will—be made to their particular pieties? And their wealth will effect how Mecca and Medina, long centers of intra-Muslim commerce, receive them.
Because of the weakness of post-colonial states, and the unrepresentative nature of many of their governments, the vision of an Islamic state, or a Caliphate, or some means of restoring dignity to Muslim populations was for a time attractive. But now even strong states are caught up in a network they cannot control: Greece sneezes, and Wall Street panics. In the Muslim world, the romanticism of pan-Islamism is fading, in part because it has no realizable form. In its place, Muslims will look to common practices to fuse their desire for better governance with their desire to keep religiosity a part of their public identity. Mecca and Medina offer the best means of doing so, as a site to confirm, express and link pieties—reinforcing religion in places very far from the Kingdom.
Many Muslims object to Saudi Arabia’s control of Islam’s holy cities. But they should note that although Saudi Arabia controls Mecca and Medina, Mecca and Medina also control Saudi Arabia.
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