Militarism and the Bedouin: Intersections of colonialism,gender,and race in the Arab Gulf

Introduction

December 2017 (Doha) – It’s four in the afternoon as I switch on the television to Qatar TV, where the anchor delivers the daily news. A small timer can be seen in the far-left corner of the screen, counting the days since Qatar’s diplomatic crisis with its neighbors began in June 2017. The timer reads 159 days. The broadcast ends, and the music begins. In a faraway land of endless deserts and traipsing camels, the silhouette of a man emerges on horseback as he gallops across the barren landscape of the Peninsula. As night falls, the man finds himself at the entrance of a bayt al-sha’r, ¹ being received by his Bedouin hosts as the camera focuses on the hands of a woman roasting the beans of the gahwa ² that will soon be served to the new guest. The scene cuts out, and we are back in the desert, but the stranger-man is nowhere to be seen. In his place is an armored tank cutting across the ridges of the sand dunes as armored soldiers march across the desert in formation, akin to the trekking camels of an earlier epoch. Aerial shots of a skyline filled with skyscrapers confirm the viewer’s return to modernity and the present day. Multiple shots of military training and parades seemingly confirm the existence of a pressing threat, as the poem’s words reference the resilience of the nation and the dependability of its citizens in the face of an attack. The poem’s main stanza plays over and over:

Our country, among nations, ascends in its steadfastness

Wherever our country wishes us to fight we shall.

For Her, we shall bend a knee to protect. ³

I change the channel to Abu Dhabi TV, and it’s almost like the switch was never made. In this song, however, the time frame is flipped as the viewer locates themselves in a dystopian, militarized present. ⁴ Apache helicopters hover in tight circles over the city of Abu Dhabi as the geography shifts from urban skies to desert landscapes. In the blink of an eye, the helicopters change shape to eagles soaring, searching, and promptly swooping in on their prey. The figure of the Bedouin man appears again as he gallops across the bellies of the endless sand dunes, ready to pursue his enemy. Before I could wonder who or what the man was pursuing, the poem’s verse calls the nation’s men to protect their country. What plays in the background of this video is a popular form of local Gulf music known as shailat, a vernacular style of poetry that is often imposed on a tune and sung solo. In one state’s version, the poem is a warning to the other; in another, it is a militarized display of loyalty to the state performed by its people through poetic verse. In this Bedouin style of poetry, the melodies and rhythms are kept simple, and the oration is syllabic, since the text is of utmost importance and the music is the tool that carries the poem (Urkevich, 2015).

If the above vignette seems like a confusing juxtaposition of a ‘before’ and ‘after’, that’s because it is. In the scholarship, militarism is primarily understood as a national phenomenon and is reflective of a modernization and role-expansion of the military. With the end of the Cold War and the predominance of Eurocentric and liberal political thought, discussions on war and militarism as objects of analysis were incorporated under the rubric of security (Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018). Security became the dominant frame through which armed conflicts, especially in the Global South, were identified, analyzed, and combatted on a global scale (Basham, 2018).

In this post–Cold War discourse and postcolonial ‘after’ period, many developing countries were now being defined by their levels of democratization and their commitment towards economic liberalization, as international organizations and governments focused on ‘populations living in the spaces of the Global South [who] suffered from [civil war and conflict as] “aberrant” forms of “illiberal” and “pre-modern” forms of violence’ (Gelot and Sandor, 2019: 526). The commonly held assumption was that processes of liberalization would challenge and ‘remedy’ militaristic ideologies, practices, and structures prevalent in countries of the Global South (Stavrianakis and Selby, 2012). The highlighting of security as a precondition for development (Gelot and Sandor, 2019; Stavrianakis, 2019) left many postcolonial states with a persistent desire to be considered ‘equals’, based on Westphalian ideals of sovereignty. Parashar (2018) argues that mimetic constructions of the European/Western social order through displays of security are a symptom of ‘postcolonial anxiety’ (Krishna, 1999) that contributes to ‘excessive militarism’ by the postcolonial state.

The discourse on militarism is underpinned by the notion of the failed state and justified as a response to the threat of internal conflict or war. This frame effectively works by disconnecting landscapes of contemporary militarism and geopolitics from prior histories of everyday violence, social difference, and normalized power relationships enacted by the pre-modern and/or colonial state (Bonds and Inwood, 2016). Howell’s work on militarization processes in the USA, for example, is strongly critical of the before/after and war/society distinction implicit in the concept of militarization. Her work urges the reader to ‘forget militarization’ in favor of ‘martial politics’ as a concept that ‘denies any innocent domain of “normal politics” by pointing out the martial nature of contemporary and historical political formations’ (Howell, 2018: 121). Although Howell’s concept of ‘martial politics’ is compatible with the ways in which militarism is articulated and expressed in the Arab Gulf, the present article takes issue with the idea of abandoning militarization as a concept altogether precisely when it comes to postcolonial cultures and contexts. Howell’s argument looks at a society – the United States – that has always been colonial, whereas this article examines militarism and militarization conditions in the Arab Gulf also during the precolonial stage.

Using the opening vignette as its starting point, the article explores the everyday embeddedness of martial politics in the Arab Gulf through an examination of martial representations of the Bedouin subject in state media productions. It argues that using the Bedouin subject and Bedouin poetry as martial representations of the strength of the Qatari and Emirati nations is largely effective because such constructs hold echoes of a colonial past that was pressed by external (Western) military logics in a process through which militarism encroached on (relative) peace in the region.

The article makes a critical contribution to feminist security studies literature by modifying Howell’s concept of martial politics to explain not only the constitutive power of war in ‘war-like’ politics, but also the powers by which war is itself constituted, particularly in postcolonial contexts. In its attempt to dispose of militarization, martial politics disrupts the separation of before/after and war/society, overlooking the fact that such distinctions are pertinent, and far less implicit, in postcolonial contexts. By implying that war exists as a given condition before all others in martial politics (see Nisha Shah, in MacKenzie et al., 2019: 822), Howell risks reproducing the very ontology she seeks to abandon – a problem this article seeks to address.

The article uses the example of Bedouin shailat poetry to show how tribal and state power constituted war in both the pre- and the postcolonial periods. It explores how the Bedouin shaila transformed from an instrument once used for everyday political mediation, rather than militarized organized violence, into a tool that was subsequently appropriated by the colonial and postcolonial state to become part of a nexus of militarism/insecurity. Using the shaila as a vehicle for analysis allows us to look beyond the ways in which militarism, as an ideology and practice, encroaches on ideas of the ‘normal’ and the ‘peaceful’ in both the past and present periods. Despite the martial nature of this poetic genre, the transformation of its content into nationalistic praise for the nation-state signifies a distinct before/after distinction that cannot be dismissed.

The article’s methodological intervention shows how a recourse to poetic sources can shed light on some of the blind spots in security studies that result from debates that focus on expanding versus contracting the definition of security. The invocation of poetry for our study of militarism allows us to focus on both expanding and contracting definitions of security as it locates a historically contingent form of power – within poetry – through which war was constituted. By paying attention to the sphere in which bodies, poetry, and aesthetics intersect – a moment captured through the performance of shailat – we can see not only why the figure of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ is used for the promotion of militaristic ideologies, but also how the invocation of poetry is temporally operationalized by the postcolonial state through its logic of security.

Although British powers were successful in eliminating all forms of indigenous warfare across the Gulf region following the imposition of colonial ‘protection’ in 1820, colonialism effectively normalized a ‘culture of militarism’ (Teaiwa, 2005, 2017) that largely depended on ethnic stereotypes such as the ‘Bedouin warrior’. The Qatari and Emirati states’ continued reliance on these colonial stereotypes, along with their associated modes of poetic expression, to consolidate political legitimacy in the postcolonial state context speaks volumes about the efficacy of such constructs. Drawing on archival data collected during my PhD fieldwork in Doha, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), in 2016–2017, the article explores the effects of British colonialism in the Gulf and the politics of security, militarism, and masculinity it has engendered, using the figure of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ and the Bedouin poetic genre of shailat as its primary examples. In keeping with the theme of this special issue, the article focuses on specificities of Gulf militarism, using poetic sources as a vehicle to explain how security was/is ‘produced’ by the colonial and sovereign state, and looking at the politics of militarism and masculinity thus engendered via a ‘bottom-up’ approach.

The first section addresses a gap in the literature on militarism, with its unquestioning usages of ‘security’ as a guiding concept, by drawing on debates that examine security and militarism as co-constitutive practices and logics (Frowd and Sandor, 2018). It seeks to use the concepts of ‘security’ and ‘militarism’ as objects of analysis, connecting these concepts to Gulf settings in order to highlight how war, security, and society have always been mutually imbricated, particularly in postcolonial contexts. The second section looks at the historical roots of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype and its colonial creation in relation to the asymmetrical constitution of force by British colonial powers. The section highlights the contrast between the modern state-endorsed militarized image of the Bedouin warrior and the historically problematized identity of the Bedouin, which has been viewed as a threat that required securitization by the colonial state. In the third section, I use the metaphor of shailat and the evocation of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype in state articulations of ‘security’ as proof of the long historical continuities of martial politics (Howell, 2018) that engender militarism, but not necessarily ‘security’ for all of the state’s subjects. Colonial restrictions on the use of force and consequent attempts by local ruling elites to disarm the Bedouin by recruiting them into state security forces effectively meant that Bedouin poetry, which had previously served as a means for conflict resolution and power negotiation, no longer could serve its intended purpose.

Despite continuities in the story of Gulf militarism, discontinuities persist – particularly when we look at the shaila’s reproduction by the nation-state. In fact, contemporary representations of shailat necessarily overlook the distorted function of the shaila, which has gone from serving as a historical tool of dispute mediation, as opposed to war preparation, into an apparatus representing the nation’s call-to-arms. Contextualizing the shaila’s transformation in such a way allows us to see that a clear before/after distinction arises in a non-accidental way, precisely stemming from the Gulf’s colonial encounter and the militarism it engendered. In order to make it clear that a before/after distinction exists in relation to practices of militarization and their contribution to insecurity for certain subjects, the final section looks at the example of the 1996 coup attempt in Qatar. Led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, this event militarized certain segments of Qatar’s Bedouin population and left thousands with revoked citizenships for decades. The revocation of citizenships from subjects once termed a ‘martial race’ was an exercise in (sovereign) power through which war was constituted and exemplifies continued militarization that feeds into postcolonial nationalism through a negation of the ‘Other’.

Conceptualizing militarism through coloniality

Scholarly insights from feminist studies and postcolonial research have underscored the analytical ambiguousness of militarism. Historically, militarism was understood as an ‘ideology that glorifies war, military institutions, and martial values’ (Stavrianakis, 2015: 490). Broadly defined, it is the preparation for war, its normalization and legitimation (Stavrianakis and Stern, 2018), and is often identified in relation to military buildups (Berghahn, 1981; Stavrianakis and Selby, 2012) and arms-transfer practices (Stavrianakis, 2019). Militarism is also conceptualized as a set of discourses that either result in or are a result of processes of militarization (Luckham, 1994), which entails an expansion of military power into non-military sectors of society (Kinsella, 2012). An overrepresentation of the military’s values and influence can often leave states, individuals, and societies in a heightened state of war preparedness, leading to ‘the blurring or erasure of distinctions between . . . military and civilian’ (Sjoberg and Via, 2010: 7).

Much of the feminist and postcolonial literature on militarization/militarism highlights the inadequacy of categories that distinguish between war and peace, or between domestic and political violence, along with the difficulty that arises when discerning between ‘ordinary’ aggression and violence as war (Cockburn, 2010; Sjoberg, 2010). Barkawi, for example, highlights the Eurocentrism underpinning war/peace distinctions and rejects this binary by arguing that ‘war and peace are together interwoven into social, economic, political and cultural life. Whether there is war or peace may not be a question susceptible to a yes or no; “peacetime” may be shot through with relations of force and war’ (Barkawi, 2016: 202).

In fact, and as in the case of many postcolonial societies, distinctions between war/peace and before/after are a complicated affair. In some instances, these distinctions were intentionally diffused as a direct result of the colonial encounter and its shaping of ‘statehood’. In contemporary state contexts, distinctions between war/peace and before/after are pertinent and made ever-present to signify the postcolonial state’s ascension into ‘sovereign’ statehood.

The diffusion of distinctions between these organizing binaries contributes to what Krishna (1999) calls ‘postcolonial anxiety’, which leads to a persistent desire on the part of ex-colonized states to be considered equals. Mimetic constructions of ‘sovereign equality’ manifest through the story of militarism (Parashar, 2018). Referring to the African continent, Mama and Okazawa-Rey (2012) explain that militarism’s more enduring cultural, ideological, and political aspects often precede the explicit emergence of military regimes and conflicts, and tend to persist long after ‘peace’ has been officially declared.

It is for this reason that feminist security studies scholarship has long argued that security – as a lived experience – should not be overlooked (Hansen, 2000; Wibben, 2011) in attempts to understand how militarism becomes normalized by actors and practices on a local and global scale (Basham, 2013, 2018). Parashar (2018) argues that, like the notion of the patriarchy, the ubiquitous deployment of militarism in the singular flattens out any difference in its manifestations across different contexts. Part of militarism’s conceptual ‘flattening out’ can be attributed to a drawback in the use of militarism/militarization terminology within mainstream international relations literature post–Cold War discourse in favor of security/securitization concepts (Stavrianakis and Selby, 2012). This further contributed to the singularization of militarism as a concept and was reflective of a larger universal attitude that was more concerned with ‘human security’ and demilitarization. Stavrianakis’s critique of the 1994 UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) shows how, instead of diminishing militarism, the ATT actually ‘demonstrate[s] competing modes of militarism in play in the contemporary, postcolonial world. These different modes of militarism are expressed in terms of sovereignty, political economy, or human security, and are all underpinned by ongoing imperial relations: racial, gendered and classed relations of asymmetry and hierarchy that persist despite formal sovereignty’ (Stavrianakis, 2019: 58). She argues that the ‘human security’ agenda rests on a contradiction: that global politics can remain militarized in one way, through excessive military spending and asymmetry, yet remain demilitarized in another way, through the drafting of arms control treaties aimed at preventing human rights violations.

Teaiwa’s (2005, 2017) work on militarization in the Pacific addresses the contradiction found in competing modes of militarism, using the concept of ‘cultures of militarism’ to encompass both moments of demilitarization and pacification during British colonialism, for example, and the ways in which the Pacific has been (re)militarized through colonial and neocolonial interventions. The concept takes stock of Western militarism’s view of ‘indigenous soldiering not as work but as a performance of an essential identity’ (Teaiwa, 2017: 13) and how ‘local cultures resisted, adapted and articulated their own forms of militarism against Western interventions and influence’ (see Megan MacKenzie, in MacKenzie, 2019: 818). In an effort to understand how meanings of ‘security’ take shape within ‘cultures of militarism’ from a top-down and a bottom-up perspective, the following sections will discuss why indigenous soldiering became a performance of an essential identity in the story of militarism, and how local cultures adapt and articulate their own types of militarism against Western/external intervention and in states of exception.

One way of exploring how meanings of security take shape within processes of militarism/militarization is through an examination of the central role played by the figurative soldier in the history and identity of the nation (Cooper and Hurcombe, 2009: 103; Millar, 2019). Millar notes how the meaning of a ‘figure’ is formed through distillations of shared meanings, background understandings, and normative orientations, through which ‘processes of figuration facilitate militarism through two parallel moves: first, the elevation of the soldier as a universalized, normatively ideal individual, and, second, the attribution of those characteristics to the like-wise universal (nation)state’ (Millar, 2019: 205). Processes of figuration help us understand how militarism becomes a defining element of race, as well as gender norms and relations (Cockburn, 2010), by privileging certain races and masculinities and by marginalizing other racial groups, women, and values that are associated with femininity. An example of this can be seen in the colonial construction of the ‘martial race’ category, which promotes the notion of a militarized masculinity as the archetypal gender-construct male. This happens in relation to the historical and contemporary subordination, as well as marginalization, of other races and/or males (Whitworth, 2007).

Another way of exploring how meanings of security are fixed in security studies narratives (Wibben, 2011: 6) is by examining mythologies or stories made through the ‘scripting of danger’ regarding who and what constitutes a legitimate/real threat. Mackenzie shows how narratives of ‘us versus them’ work by evoking ‘abstract yet salient messages that inform what is considered common sense within security studies’ (Mackenzie, 2011: 586), insofar that any security ‘narrative’ that ‘doesn’t conform to this structure, and might challenge these epistemological assumptions [is] not recognized as security talk’ (Wibben, 2011: 66). Cultural theorist Ronald Barthes’s (2000) work on ‘common sense’, myth, and ideology suggests that if we can understand how a narrative is seen and consumed as ‘common sense’, we can expose underlying hierarchical structures. Similarly, using the concept of ‘unconscious ideology’, Cynthia Weber (2005: 5) discusses security practices seen as common sense, which help us make sense of our worlds without our realizing it. The present article attempts to remedy our understanding of ‘common sense’ security practice by looking at common/usual forms of oral expression in the Gulf, using poetry as an expression of everyday in/security. As Hansen (2000) reminds us, the exclusionary logic of security overlooks how ‘security’ is equally about the insecurities we often do not hear about, as well as the gaps and silences we find in certain stories or poems about security.

Linda Åhäll’s (2016) work on militarism/militarization uses dance as a methodological metaphor to explain what the political puzzle of militarization is. Åhäll uses this methodological metaphor to make sense of ‘common sense’ security practices in order to explain the normalizing process of militarization. Åhäll’s decision to focus on dance as a metaphor effectively captures the simultaneity of subtle movement, bodies, and emotions both on the micro level, as in the example of militarized dance during Remembrance Week, and on a macro level, through the process of normalizing militarization as the character of society. Åhäll (2016: 14) concludes by saying that if militarized events such as dance performances in public space are viewed as ‘just normal’ through forming part of our common sense, this leaves ‘little space to resist [militarizing] maneuvers, because it just does not make sense to do so’.

Khalid Hassan’s (2018) work on militarization of public spaces echoes Åhäll’s reflection in relation to physical space, showing how an extended state of exception imposed by India in Kashmir manifests through a foreclosure of space, curfews, and the presence of or violent interventions by the Indian army. The result has been an ‘eradication of the public – the space of poetry, dance, singing and theatre’ (Hassan, 2018: 212). Hassan’s ideas build on Agamben’s earlier work on the ‘state of exception’ and the mechanisms employed by modern states to control their problematic populations. For Agamben (1998), a state of exception is not a state of necessity; ‘rather it is a state in which law is suspended without ceasing to be in force’ (Hassan, 2018: 213), in which the exception becomes the rule through the appropriation of the legislative by the executive. In this view, the sovereign and the banned subject both occupy a space inside and outside of the law, albeit in different ways. Sovereign power is privileged by law in its ability to suspend the law (in the case of emergency), whereas the banned subject is subjected to the violence of law despite not being protected by it. The relation between the powerful state and powerless people is that of sovereign and banned person in the Agambenian sense (Hassan, 2018: 215) – or the Gulf state and the stateless Bedouin in this article’s case – in which the latter is disrobed of legal status (think: citizenship) in a controlled space.

Confronting colonialism and the construction of the Bedouin as a ‘martial race’

Over a period of 150 years, from 1820 to 1971, Britain’s imperialism in the Arab Gulf was practiced and enforced through a system of colonial ‘protection’. Initially, colonial interest in the region focused more on the protection of British maritime trade routes to India. This later prompted a series of maritime treaties of protection that were drafted by the British and signed by various tribal heads across the Gulf, in which ‘piracy’ was identified as a threat to the security of the Gulf people and their waters. The colonial remedy for this kind of ‘insecurity’ initially came in the form of an anti-piracy treaty, known as the General Treaty of 1820. This treaty, which was followed by a series of other treaties, conceptualized and legally defined the Arab Gulf’s security architecture through colonial monopolization of all violence and through the blanket outlawing of all use of force by local subjects. In order to supervise the implementation of the General Treaty and to ensure British military domination over the Gulf region, all personal arms used by indigenous subjects were outlawed unless an arms license issued by the British Agent was granted (Mathew, 2016; Onley 2007, 2009). Practically, what these restrictions meant for many of the Gulf’s subjects was that they were no longer able carry arms for the purpose of self-protection. Although the treaties of protection sanctioned the Royal Navy’s monopoly over the legitimate use of force in the Arabian Sea, incidents of violence and raiding continued to occur. And since these incidents were only selectively addressed and compensated for by the British, colonial efforts at disarming the population actually made subjects more susceptible to violence. By 1916, and as a result of the treaties of ‘protection’, the Gulf polities of Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman were formally recognized as ‘protected states’ under British colonial control.

In this pre-modern state context, ‘bedouinism’ referred to a nomadic and pastoralist way of life that revolved around the economy and ecology in the Arabian Peninsula (Cole, 2003: 252). The term ‘Bedouin’ stems from the word Badawi (pl. bedu), meaning ‘desert-dweller’ and is an antonym of hadr, which refers to sedentary and urban-dwelling populations (Cole, 2003: 237). The Peninsula’s harsh ecological conditions meant that pastoralism was generally unpredictable, which led many tribes to resort to a diversification of resources that saw economic and political transactions taking place between nomadic and sedentary tribes alike. Tribes and ruling families often competed over the Gulf’s limited natural resources, and, as ‘those who possessed scarce resources were always at risk of losing them, an atmosphere of uncertainty prevailed in the open terrain of the desert and sea’ (Landen, 1986: 59–60). Legitimation of power and resource-management were roles that were largely enforced by native tribes through a combination of raiding (ghazw) and taxation. Rulers and tribal chiefs would often collect taxes from the population on all sources of income, such as pearling, date farming, and fishing, in return for the patrons’ commitment to protect these populations against raids or attacks from other tribes or external forces (Al-Naqeeb, 1990; Al-Rasheed, 1991; Onley, 2004, 2007).

Colonial definitions of ‘violence’ and the designation of ‘threat’ in protection treaties problematically overlooked the fact that raiding and piracy in the Gulf was rarely about violence or grievous harm per se. Rather, such activities allowed tribes to assert their political dominance, acting as a means of sharing the Peninsula’s limited natural resources (Al-Rasheed, 1991). Far from being a form of ungoverned violence, the practice of raiding by Gulf locals was more about capturing livestock than about harming human life, and was governed by the principle of reciprocity, the understanding being that counter-raids would ensue in return. Rosenfeld’s observations of the Bedouins in Saudi Arabia note their collective recognition of a system of rights and responsibilities between themselves, upheld by their right to engage in self-protection, where ‘their major mechanism for preserving this equality [was] their preservation of their right to act militarily. They are kin military groups which do not recognize monopolies in the use of force by any single group’ (Rosenfeld, 1965: 174). In the face of colonial protectionist policies sweeping across the region, the Bedouin’s disregard for any monopolies in the use of force was perceived as a security ‘problem’ by the colonial state.

The creation of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype first emerged within this context. In trying to understand the Bedouin as a race, British explorers (Kelly, 1964, 1968; Palgrave, 2019) in the 1800s and 1900s were guided by certain ethnographic axioms that rested on racial classifications for British colonial powers to manage population difference (Assi, 2018). To help distinguish the Bedouin from other populations, colonial travelers identified their aesthetic and cultural markers – ranging from hairstyles, clothing, and head-dresses, to notions of ‘honor’ and ‘valor’ – as ethnic traits. ⁵ Thesiger went as far as to say that ‘everything that is good about the Arabs has come to them from the desert. The only society in which I’ve found nobility is that of the Bedouin’ (quoted in Taylor, 1995: 130). General John Glubb’s perspective on the Bedouin while stationed in Jordan in 1939 went even further, and he described them as ‘noble warrior figures imbued with a native intelligence but unsuited to the modern world, except insofar as their warlike nature could be utilized’ (Glubb, 1983: 103). Through such accounts, the Bedouin were singled out as the ‘original Arab race’ owing to their unique sociopolitical value system and mode of life (Assi, 2018), whose ‘fighting’ nature could be harnessed by the colonial state and later subsumed under the rubric of state security once independence was gained.

The representation of the Bedouin as a separate, martial race contributed to what Abu-Lughod (1989: 280–287) calls homo segmentarius, a notion that exoticized the Bedouin as nomads and essentialized them by privileging their tribalism and segmentary lineage organization (Collombier and Roy, 2018: 280–287). As a construct of orientalism, homo segmentarius meant that the concept of the tribe as a sociopolitical organization was neglected in favor of a ‘functionalist understanding of tribes as collective actors, bound by blood and honor and trapped in some sort of balanced opposition game’ (Hüsken, 2019: 37).

British colonial depictions of the Bedouin as nomadic, stateless, and fierce fighters ironically also cast them as ‘lawless subjects’ and potential ‘threats’ to the idea of the nation-state. As Bhabha illustrates, colonial discourse was dependent on the notion of fixity, where the creation of stereotypes relies on a ‘paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise, the stereotype which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’ (Bhabha, 1983: 18). To help centralize power and monopolize all violence across the region, colonial protectionist discourse employed the ‘Bedouin warrior’ construct as a common-sense antidote to the Gulf region’s supposed insecurity and perceived threats. Security within this context was conceptualized as the reaffirmation of a colonial masculine self-image in the face of the uncontrolled masculinity of the racialized ‘Other’ (Khalid, 2019: 44). The British construction of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype and the depiction of the Bedouin as a ‘martial’ race situated the Bedouin’s violence in relation to arms-control regimes and managed it through the enforcement of colonial protectionist discourse. This later meant that the Bedouin’s ‘violent’ nature could be harnessed by the colonial state by incorporating Bedouin subjects into the state security apparatus.

Colonial representations of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ figure paradoxically referenced a tribal bygone past that relied on raiding for its ‘lived experience’ of security, against a physical context in the present where local subjects were disarmed and prohibited from using any form of force. Street’s (2004) work on martial races and masculinities similarly emphasizes the dissonance between martial-race representation and the social and economic realities faced by certain ‘martial race’ groups, shaped by their collective and individual experiences. As a result of their inability to use force or practice self-defense, ‘martial races’ such as the Bedouin were effectively reduced to an indeterminate status, or what Agamben (2000) calls ‘bare life’. ‘Bare life’ in the Agambenian sense is a form of life that is banned by sovereign power from law and politics, where the subject’s ‘undecidable status allows for the routinization of exceptional practices because access to conventional juridical-political structures is denied’ (Vaughan-Williams, 2016: 194). Colonial practices of exclusion that portrayed the Bedouin as a fighting race by categorizing their warfare as a potential ‘threat’ correspondingly negated the possibility for such subjects to engage with their community in a human way (Murphy, 2018) and entrenched an insecurity within their subjectivities. Such portrayals not only served to legitimize the colonial encounter as a civilizing project, but also transformed the Bedouin into a gendered and racialized figuration of security that could not only uphold the logic of colonial protection but also legitimize the British presence within the region.

Significantly, the representation of the Bedouin as a martial race served as a core ideological tenet for the production of Gulf militarism, which fixed their identities as timeless and rigid constructs within a political and social order that was very different from the order that had previously existed. In this sense, the figure of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ encapsulated a linear and continuous transition from the Gulf’s precolonial past, despite British arms-control regimes and use-of-force prohibitions that were visibly more about discontinuing such practices in the present. The transformation of the Bedouin as a figuration of security for the colonial state helped engender militarization/militarism in the Gulf, precisely because the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype is ‘common sense’ and seemingly belies any distinction between a ‘before’ period and an ‘after’.

Yet, if we look closely at the style and verse of shailat poetry used in contemporary Qatari and Emirati patriotic songs, we can see that a pertinent distinction between before and after exists as a result of the way in which the sovereign states imitate this Bedouin poetic tradition and their intentions in doing so. In Eastwood’s view, militarism describes a ‘particular kind of penetration by military relations of social relations, one that is not necessarily equally present in all cases . . . the particular kind of penetration being implied by the term “militarism” is an ideological penetration’ (Eastwood, 2018: 49, emphasis in original). Although raiding and piracy did occur across the Gulf region long before the colonial encounter, acts of violence served a specific and singular purpose that was rarely ideological or bound to other activities or subjectivities beyond the tribes’ strategic outcome. ⁶ And while there was some penetration of social relations by military relations prior to the colonial encounter, raiding was a sporadic and irregular form of warfare that could hardly be described as an organized form of violence. The practice of ‘violence’ and its mis/management is a familiar genre in oral Bedouin shailat poetry, which served as an indigenous method of political persuasion and regulation of violence among the Gulf’s tribal populations.

Understanding shailat poetry as a (de)political act

Shaila (sg.), meaning to raise or lift your voice, is a general term used for the singing of poems in meter (Sowayan, 1985). It describes the act of the poet chanting freely before others while musically testing the rhyme and balance of the poem. Raiding and warfare greatly inspired this martial poetry genre, as well as the collective male battle-song dances of arda and dahha that sometimes accompany it. The two battle dances are similar, where large groups of men stand in ranks as they rock side to side along with each stanza of the poem. Urkevich notes that, in the absence of written history, vernacular poetry such as shailat served a historical function for the Bedouin as it worked to ‘communicate and commemorate events, including issues related to tribal territories, watering holes, grievances, battles. . . . [It] has played an influential role in maintaining various codes of honor and chivalry, celebrating heroic acts, and vilifying social violators. Tribes, individuals, and animals were honored and immortalized, while cowardice and cultural offenses were criticized’ (Urkevich, 2015: 16).

In order to preserve and emit this oral tradition, recollection and memory were essential components for the poem’s travel and transference. Poems were often a representation of a moment witnessed, orally recorded, and interpreted in relation to the poet’s political and sociocultural context. Although the shaila is often sung solo, the response of the audience is paramount to the poem’s expansion and transmittance in future orations. Al-Ghadeer (2009: 19) notes how in ‘mediated oral poetry, there is never an accurate version. On the contrary, there will inevitably be different versions of popular poetry in circulation, and some poetic fragments have been attributed to more than one poet’. The spontaneity that accompanied this mode of expression made it hard to trace the poem back to its ‘original’ author, since ownership can rarely be traced in written or recorded form.

Rather than a form of ‘organized violence’, in his reflections on militarism in Arab society Jandora (1997: 4) understands raiding as ‘irregular warfare’. He notes how such a practice was carried out with minimal violence and afforded a test of courage and martial skill for tribesman involved, as their deeds were commemorated in oral traditions and poems (Jandora, 1997: 4–5). The shaila in the Gulf’s case was a poetic performance that captured how violence was enacted and regulated, acting as ‘a form of political rhetoric in dispute mediations’ (Caton, 1993: 41). In his work on the poetic traditions of North Yemen, Caton (1993) observes how poetry was used as a form of verbal persuasion that constructed the bounds and norms of force during a brief moment when a tribal war erupted between two feuding clans. He argues that the ‘composition of poetry is embedded in an extremely important political process – the dispute mediation – in which power, such as it exists in this system, must be achieved through persuasion’ (Caton, 1993: 21). Poetry in this context served a political purpose given that its composition was always in relation to an actual event, where ‘the poet has power over men, and poetry is a deeply political act. By eloquence he can stir or, better yet, captivate an audience; if his poetic talents are truly outstanding, the chances are greater the audience will do his bidding’ (Caton, 1993: 41). Although tribal kinship helped form the bounds of the political arena in the Gulf region, it was actually the poetry that ‘capture[d] the essence of competition: the language of kinship . . . it provides a ready-made ideology through which combatants stigmatize the enemy’ (Compagnon, 1998: 79).

By the 1920s, however, indigenous forms of poetry like the shaila had lost most of their political significance as a result of the colonial encounter. Colonial regulations on the use of force effectively meant that the Bedouin could no longer engage in raids, which effectively had a silencing effect on the nature of the information being transmitted through their poetry. Thus, colonial measures to monopolize violence were successful in undermining tribal forms of conflict management not only through arms-control regimes but also by eroding the political significance of this poetic tradition to power negotiations and rules of warfare.

The depoliticization of the shaila as a political act is one example of how colonialism engendered militarism across the Gulf. The reproduction and contemporary iteration of shailat today is an example of how Gulf militarism engenders particular insecurities for some of its population through the evocation of poetry. Through its association with militarized state performances and in its praise of state decisions, the poetry in most Qatari and Emirati national songs feels more like an imitation of a bedouinized martial tradition rather than being a true representation of such a tradition. It marks a relatively easy means by which Gulf governments can persuade their public to support state policies and can often be heard in the opening ceremonies for national days and official state events (Khalaf, 2000). In this modern-state landscape, the poetry is orated through speakers directed at the sheikh in attendance, while traditional national guard soldiers stand side by side with members of the armed forces. Poetic rituals in places like the UAE and Qatar are, as Khalaf (2000: 252) describes, ‘like a text inscribed for the modern historical context and written by state agents’. The reproduction of poetry in this way relies on familiar rules and rituals found in Gulf poetry to inculcate militarized values and norms of behavior within society. The reproduction of this art form by the modern Gulf states immediately implies a continuity with the past – even if no continuum exists.

In certain ways, the Qatari and Emirati states’ utilization of Bedouin poetry and its evocation of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ stereotype is also an attempt to reconstitute the nation-state’s ‘self’ both in this poetic discourse and through this poetic tradition. Through poetry, ruling elites attempt to ‘reconstruct, synthesize, and even invent symbols that will touch a psychological nerve in the populace at large. A strong state is one that can exercise this craft and that continues to forge emotive links with the populace over which it rules’ (Davis, 1991: 13). The essentialization of the Bedouin’s figure and poetry through state logics of security helps strengthen citizen’s political perception of the state by promoting a martial national identity. It also fosters the belief that stability and historical continuity underpin processes of state modernization in either state. But the irony of the façade of stability is that processes of securitization – which later fed into productions of militarism – actively required the presence of constant ‘threat’. Such ‘threats’ later come to inspire postcolonial states’ anxieties and actually contribute to greater insecurity the longer these processes are in place. The next section looks at the events of the 1996 coup attempt on Qatar, which led to the mass revocation of citizenships from one Bedouin tribe in particular, as an example of how militarism engenders particular forms of insecurities (Parashar, 2018).

The (dis)inclusion of the Bedouin in postcolonial security arrangements

One does not need to look far into Qatar and the UAE’s recent political developments or ‘war-like political formations’ (Howell, 2018) to witness colonial histories of military imbrication in social relations targeting Bedouin populations in particular. An example of this can be seen in the case of the 1996 attempted coup d’etat by the Saudi and Emirati states against the sheikh of Qatar, in which Bedouin soldiers were specifically selected for the operation on the basis of their tribal lineage. Rather than relying on foreign mercenaries to carry out the operation, Saudi and Emirati state officials believed that the coup’s ‘legitimacy’ hinged on its execution by certain tribal Qatari actors. Notable members from Qatar’s largest Bedouin tribe, the Al-Murrah, were specifically targeted and endowed with large amounts of cash and arms to carry out the operation. A documentary on Al Jazeera on the 1996 events further alleges that Saudi and Emirati state actors made large cash payments to the Bedouin tribes living on the Saudi–Qatari border in the days leading up to the coup in order to secure their allegiance. ⁷ The coup itself was unsuccessful, but it unleashed ripple effects within Qatari society that were mostly felt by one family in particular. In the weeks following the attempted coup, the Qatari state made sweeping arrests as hundreds of individuals were put on trial. In order to escape retribution from the Qatari state, many of the coup’s organizing members fled to Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the hope of gaining state protection. As time passed, it became apparent that a significant number of the coup’s organizing members were Bedouin, and from one particular clan within the Al-Murrah tribe. ⁸ Although only 127 tribal members were involved in organizing the coup, the Qatari state made the decision to revoke approximately 6000 Qatari citizenships, with some individuals being forcibly deported to Saudi Arabia.

Since Qatar’s Nationality Law dictates that an individual’s lineage is established through paternal descent, the stripping of nationalities from certain male tribal members had a predictable domino effect on the rest of their dependents, whose own nationalities were nullified as a result. The withdrawal of nationalities wreaked havoc on the lives of the individuals involved. Many were now without jobs, their children without schooling, and some had no access to running water or electricity in their households. ⁹ In more recent years, the Qatari state began to gradually grant back nationalities to those who had been made stateless as a result of the coup attempt, but the long-term effects of such state action had invariably shaped contemporary Bedouin identity in the Gulf.

What the story of the revocation of citizenships from the members of the Al-Murrah tribe shows is the extent to which tribal identities constitute a valid and enduring site of martial politics. As Abu-Lughod (2016: 72) recounts,

ideals of manly autonomy and tribal independence persist in resistance to government attempts to impose restrictions and curtail the Bedouin’s freedom to live their own lives and run their own affairs. . . . Wittingly or unwittingly, most people live outside the law, smuggling, crossing closed borders, carrying unlicensed firearms, avoiding conscription, not registering births, not having identity papers, evading taxes and taking issues into their own hands.

In order to legitimize the military intervention in Qatari affairs in response to a perceived ‘threat’, Saudi and Emirati logics of security capitalized on the ambiguity and indeterminacy found in the nomadic patterns of everyday Bedouin life. In fact, Bedouin subjects were carefully selected to execute the coup precisely because of colonial ideas on race and martiality, which cast the Bedouin’s apparent ‘lawlessness’ as an asset to the state through its utilization of their ‘warrior-like capabilities’. As Streets (2004: 4) reminds us, ‘the power of martial race ideology stemmed from its very flexibility and ambiguity: it was adaptable to a variety of historical and geographical situations and functioned alternately to inspire, intimidate, exclude and include’.

Considering the Al-Murrah have tribal members across the six Gulf states in the region, their diffuse tribal identity affords them the privilege of being indefinable by the nation-state, enabling them to slip through the network of state classifications and border demarcations. Rather than looking at the Bedouin’s disregard for borders or state security forces as being examples of ‘lawlessness’, one could argue that the Bedouin’s state of liminality has an inscribed perpetuity as a result of their transition from nomadism to sedentarism. In turn, the securitization of the Bedouin in Qatari society could only effectively take place by making them stateless, and by conceptualizing them as inhuman through their displacement and dispossession. The term ‘displacement’ – together with the notion of ‘statelessness’ – conjures an image of disarray, as the term reflects the action of moving something from its place or position. However, in the particular case of the Al-Murrah, displacement had the contrary effect, whereby the stripping of nationalities was successful in fixing the tribe’s identity to a demarcated territory, successfully neutralizing their political potential by encumbering them with their everyday existence of being stateless.

From the perspective of the Qatari state, the revocation of citizenships was also a response to the Bedouin’s perceived ‘lawlessness’, as it relates to the state’s expectation of total allegiance from its citizens. Despite the historical efficacy of the ‘Bedouin warrior’ construct, the state’s reaction exemplifies how martial-race discourse is persistently reflective of colonial and postcolonial ‘anxieties’ that produced such constructs (Streets, 2004: 225). The militarization by Saudi Arabia and the UAE of Bedouin subjects for the coup, and the Qatari state’s decision to revoke the citizenships of thousands of individuals on the basis of their tribal lineage, were state decisions that were in line with the colonial/postcolonial constructs of the Bedouin as the ‘untamable Other’. Although the ‘Bedouin warrior’ figure and the Bedouin poetic tradition call upon an idealized and racialized masculine ideology, in actuality the construct of the ‘untamable Other’ was what facilitated the monopolization of violence under the nation-state and served as justification for future violence by the state towards Other-ed populations. From this perspective, it becomes hard not to acknowledge the role of the Bedouin, Bedouin masculinity, and Bedouin traditions and poetry in facilitating the Gulf states’ transition from past to present, smoothing over discontinuities and ruptures in their histories and diffusing distinctions between war and peace or military and civilian divides. Still, incidents like the 1996 coup attempt and the subsequent arbitrary revocations of citizenship represent a change in the degree of militarization taking place within Gulf societies, highlighting the ways in which race and gender are used as constructs by the state to draw the boundaries of dis/inclusion within citizenship rights.

Concluding remarks

This article has attempted to draw out how a reciprocal relationship exists between colonialism, culture, Bedouin masculinities, and militarism in the Arab Gulf. The article argued that Qatar and the UAE’s contemporary displays of militarism should be read in relation to how colonialism engendered and normalized militarism in and through martial constructs of the Bedouin. The first section evidenced how the blanket colonial outlawing of all use of force by local subjects entrenched gendered and racialized hierarchies that were built around certain masculinities, in conjunction with the marginalization and securitization of others. Colonial tactics aimed at monopolizing violence under the colonial state engendered ruling elite and popular acceptance for military approaches by framing the Bedouin as the region’s true ‘martial race’ whose ‘fighting nature’ also posed a potential ‘threat’ for the nation-state. Lutz (2002: 723) reminds us how militarization is intimately connected not only to obvious increase in army size or strengths ‘but also to the less visible deformation of human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and to the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action’.

In this sense, the construction of the Bedouin as a ‘martial race’, and later as ‘warrior-soldiers’ of the nation-state, provided legitimacy for colonial practices such as the prohibition on violence and made interstate military interventions like the 1996 coup attempt appear like the normal and common-sense course of events. Paying close attention to how shailat’s performance and intention has changed in recent years and how incidents like the 1996 coup resulted in arbitrary mass citizenship revocations helps us see that there is nothing normal or natural about the course of militarization’s development in the Gulf, or the distinct insecurities it caused as a result of its martial constructs. The representation of the Bedouin in such a way affords the modern Gulf states’ state-development trajectory the illusion of continuum, in spite of the fact that colonialism and its militarization of the region gravely encumbered and disrupted locals’ way of life.

To the familiar ear, hearing a shaila can inspire nostalgic feelings of a time in the past filled with battles, where the duty of protecting the nation fell upon the shoulders of its fiercest men. But these feelings are ill-placed especially when we consider how Bedouin subjectivities were conceptualized by their violence and constructed as being both ‘martial’ and ‘warrior-like’ while still presenting as a threat to the colonial state that called for their securitization. In similar ways, contemporary Gulf states’ practices further entrenched this inhuman subjectivity by specifically recruiting and militarizing Bedouins for questionable state practices, such as the 1996 coup attempt. The making of 6000 Bedouin Qatari subjects stateless over the past ten years is telling of this. In the modern-day landscapes of the Gulf states, amid the hypervisualized settings of the shailat songs, the Bedouin Thesiger spoke about can no longer be found. In their place is a subjectivity that has been left disarmed by colonialism and dislocated by statelessness, while the poetry tradition of the Bedouin is imitated and reiterated during moments in time that make and unmake the Gulf states.