Review

Reviewed Work(s): TRIBAL MODERN: BRANDING NEW NATIONS IN THE ARAB GULF by
miriam cooke
Review by: Matthew MacLean
Source: The Arab Studies Journal , Fall 2015, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Fall 2015), pp. 423-427
Published by: Arab Studies Institute

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44744924

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 TRIBAL MODERN:
BRANDING NEW NATIONS IN THE ARAB GULF

miriamcooke

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014

(214 pages, notes, references, index) $25.65 (paper)

Reviewed by Matthew MacLean

Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf is the latest of a
growing body of work seeking to explain the rapid transformations of Arab
Gulf states and their emergence as regional and global actors over the past
decade. This scholarship has been dominated by historical studies drawing
on the British archives, state-centric studies of political legitimation, rentier-
state theory, and more recent work in urban studies and spatial theory. In
a departure from these trends, miriam cooke locates Gulf Arab modernity
not in material transformation but in cultural production. As a study of
contemporary Gulf Arab art, literature, and poetry, Tribal Modern is a
welcome addition to an expanding field. It also stands out as a work focused
on Qatar, the least studied of the Gulf states, where cooke did much of the
fieldwork on which the book is based.

At its outset, Tribal Modern argues against the equation of the tribal
with the primitive and non-Western, exemplified by the debate over a 1980s
MoMA exhibit titled "Primitivism in Modern Art," which juxtaposed
Western modernist and "tribal" non-Western works of art. Even critics of

Matthew MacLean is a PhD student in the Departments of History and Middle

Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU
and a Humanities Research Fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi.

423

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the exhibition's binary premise, she notes, reproduced the binaries of West/
other and tribal/modern. More commonly, cooke criticizes the tendency of
Gulf observers and expatriates to assume that Gulf Arabs must constantly
negotiate contradictory demands of tradition and modernity. Instead, she
argues, the tribal and modern are mutually constitutive and lived simultane-
ously. Here cooke employs the Quranic term barzakhy variously described
as signifying "undiluted convergence" (10), "the simultaneous process of
mixing and separation," (13), and a liminal "metaphysical space between
life and the hereafter and also the physical space between sweet and salt
water" (71). This last definition, drawn from the Quran, probably describes
the Gulf near Bahrain, where pearl divers found freshwater springs on the
Gulf floor, and salt and fresh waters mingled. Cooke's interpretation of the
barzakh is less literal; she wants the reader to think of Gulf Arab societies
as inhabiting a barzakh space where the tribal and modern converge but
remain undiluted. This barzakh forms the core of the national "brands"

that Gulf states employ to legitimize themselves in the eyes of foreigners

and citizens alike. In this way, the barzakh and the "tribal modern" are one
way to get past the tradition/modernity binary that still characterize much
of the scholarly and popular debate on Gulf societies.
Cooke begins the book with a description of the Gulf's cosmopolitan
pre-oil past, in which it was a critical node in Western Indian Ocean com-
mercial networks and a borderless, stateless center of the world's pearling
industry. The marginalizing of this polyglot world in contemporary Gulf
memory is the necessary precondition for the emergence of cooke's "tribal
modern." The decline of pearling, the rise of oil, and the subsequent spec-
tacular transformations of Gulf cities led to a massive influx of foreign
workers and new forms of cultural and economic exclusion. The emergence
of states meant that citizens began to identify themselves along national
lines, in the process downplaying or denying the cosmopolitan heritage of
the recent past. New discourses of local rootedness and cultural authen-
ticity-exemplified, in cooke's analysis, by Abdelrahman Munif 's Cities of
Salty which was long banned in Gulf countries- justify citizens' claims to
oil-generated wealth distributed by the state.
Chapters two through four analyze the nexus between tribe and
nation as categories of belonging among Gulf Arabs, and how they have
become racialized through genetic research on tribal origins. The tribe and

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 Tribal Modem

nation exist in tension with each other, as cooke explores through her study
of marriage practices. Gulf Arabs, like many people from various regions,
seek to marry spouses of similar social status; membership in a prestig-
ious tribe and citizenship in Gulf Cooperation Council nations are both
forms of social capital, which cooke illustrates with many entertaining and
informative anecdotes from her fieldwork in Qatar. Many extended families
spread across two or more Gulf states. But institutions like the United Arab
Emirates' marriage fund, which gives cash grants to Emirati nationals who
marry each other, challenge prenational and subnational tribal networks by
privileging national over tribal affiliation. Indeed, members of tribes with
transnational affiliations, such as the Qatar i- Saudi al-Murra, found their
citizenship temporarily revoked in the mid-2000s. However, tribal identities
are also reworked and performed to demonstrate allegiance to the nation
and ruling family, as when members of the Dukhan Camel Club in western
Qatar rode into Doha to congratulate the emir when Qatar was awarded the
2022 FIFA World Cup. Tribal identity and status- supposedly bolstered by
genetic research to provide scientific proof of lineage- become a substitute
for class among Qatari citizens. Gulf Arabs' discourse of "authenticity,"
which cooke compares to mid-twentieth-century Arab anticolonial rhetoric,
further undergirds their claims to tribal and national belonging and thus
also access to wealth. Here cooke critically analyzes Gulf Arabs' invention
of authenticity while also taking their use of the term seriously.
The strongest section of Tribal Modern is the discussion of museums,
architecture, and heritage in chapters five through seven. Cooke focuses on
the work of Qatari architect Muhammad Ali, who used pre-oil vernacular
forms to construct his own modern home and was also the mastermind

of the rebuilding of Suq Waqif in central Doha. Muhammad Ali based

his work on commercial records dating back to the late 1800s describing
the location of different sections in the market, their relation to the kharis
(flood channel), and the market's critical role in relations between bedouin
and the city. While not intended as a restoration of the "authentic" pre-oil
past, the new Suq Waqif was praised and criticized for being just that. By
contrast, cooke argues that Muhammad Ali succeeded in creating an urban
space used both by Qataris and expatriates that is reminiscent enough of
the past to lessen Qataris' nostalgia for what has been lost in their nation's
rapid transformation. This simulacrum, like the Qatar National Museum

425

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and the Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi (both designed by foreigners),
is a fine example of cooke s barzakh theory.
Using orientalist art and Gulf Arab literature, poetry, and film, cooke
proceeds to explain the development over the past few decades of a deep
nostalgia for the pre-oil past and the emergence of a variety of "invented
traditions" and simulacra, including camel racing, pearl- diving classes,
and televised poetry competitions. Urban cores largely abandoned by Gulf
Arabs have been revitalized as heritage districts, a phenomenon cooke
smartly links to global gentrification. In these simulacra of the tribal past
and the modern, the pre-oil era is imagined as a time of social virtue and
close-knit communities; hardship and injustice are for the most part down-
played, though cooke is careful to include the counter-examples of a 1970s
Kuwaiti film and more recent Emirati poetry criticizing the injustices of
the pearling industry. The barzakh "tribal modern" theme emerges again
in her extended description of the Abu Dhabi-sponsored reality TV show
"Millions Poet," a competitive recitation of Nabati poetry. Building on her
earlier discussion of national dress, the final chapter analyzes challenges
to contemporary gender expectations posed by women's education and the
emergence of queer sexualities. Cooke's discussion of coldness as a trope
that Gulf Arab women's literature uses to represent technology and social
alienation is also particularly insightful.
The book's largest problem is the repeated slippage between national
and regional scales. Though Gulf nations cannot be studied in isolation,
Tribal Modern moves too far in the other direction. The strongest vignettes
are those related to Qatar, but the Qatari experience cannot automatically
be generalized to the rest of the Gulf. Though drawing on examples from all
the Gulf states except for Oman in explaining the concept of "tribal modern,"
the book's analysis would have been stronger if more attention had been
paid to variations between and within Gulf states. There are also a number
of factual errors in the text. Not all Gulf Arabs identify as tribal, and cooke's
use of the term as a catch-all phrase for everything that is associated with
the past is perhaps too broad. Unlike Indians in the colonial era, Gulf Arabs
were not British subjects, but subjects of whatever shaykh they recognized
(33). The National is a newspaper based in Abu Dhabi, not Saudi Arabia
(140), and the UAE currency is the dirham, not the dinar (131). Bastakia
district in Dubai was revitalized not by Iranians (though originally settled

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 Tribal Modem

by Arabs migrating from Iran) but by Dubai Municipality (101). These errors
will undoubtedly raise the hackles of Gulf specialists, but do not detract
from the larger argument or cookes creative use of the barzakh as a way to
explain what is often perceived as a contradiction.
Tribal Modern is largely jargon-free and quite easy to read, and thus
is accessible to a wide audience. The book should be read by Gulf specialists
for its focus on cultural production, which will hopefully stimulate further
research along these lines, and by others seeking an introduction to and
survey of contemporary Gulf societies and culture.

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