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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 September 2016
This article considers the question of collective identity formation in the Arab Gulf by looking at the distinctive ways in which the genealogies of the dominant kinship collective of the United Arab Emirates, the Banī Yās confederation, have been represented by that country's cultural and heritage-making institutions. I look comparatively at two high profile, state-sponsored, Emirati genealogical projects, one a site, and the other a text, and investigate their significance from a historical and ethnographic perspective. I find that the relatively weak religious gravity of the United Arab Emirates allows for unorthodox representations of kinship at the national level, that women do not necessarily buy into these representations yet contribute in their own ways to a kinship nationalist discourse, and that genealogy is nonetheless a particularly fraught idiom for binding together an ethnically heterogeneous society like the Emirates. Approaching the public representation of genealogies through an integrative framework, this article sheds light on important themes in modern Emirati and broader Gulf social and political life, including the complicated place of religious norms in a newly fashioned Muslim nation, the influence of gender on conceptions of kinship and nationhood, and the challenge ethnic heterogeneity poses to an Arab ethno-national project.
1 The Arab Gulf states include Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.
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8 The best known of these works begin to appear around the ninth century CE.
9 By daʿwa I do not mean, as the term is commonly understood to mean, Muslim proselytizing or missionary work, whether among fellow Muslims or non-Muslims. Daʿwa in this article refers to the articulation of a particular Muslim creedal or communal orientation as a sphere of political and social influence, as in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia or Ibāḍī Oman. The implication is that the differing daʿwas of the Arabian Peninsula remain salient as political categories, and cannot be neatly circumscribed by territorial boundary lines and the Westphalian assumptions that underpin them.
10 While it might be fruitful to explore the implications of my argument for the remaining Gulf states (e.g., Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain), I do not do so in this article. It should be noted in passing that these states all lack an autochthonous daʿwa, and seem also to have embraced development strategies that are comparable to those of the UAE, to greater or lesser degrees.
11 For more on women and genealogy in the Arabian Peninsula, see vom Bruck, Gabriele, “Names as Bodily Signs,” in vom Bruck, Gabriele and Bodenhorn, Barbara, eds., The Anthropology of Names and Naming (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 225–50Google Scholar.
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21 By heartland, I am referring to the hinterland regions of the Emirates, where nomadic pastoralism was more prevalent. The Bānī Yās were documented by most British travelers as being predominantly sedentary farmers and pearl divers, not pastoralist nomads. Yet in the genealogical discourse of the modern Gulf, attaching one's history to a desert existence of the type prevailing in hinterland regions like the Ẓafra or even al-ʿAin is preferable to a coastal origins narrative, with its allusions to ethnic heterogeneity and arrival by sea from afar. Samin, Of Sand or Soil, 173–80.
22 Author interview with museum administrator, al-ʿAin, Dec. 2014.
23 Author interview with museum guide, al-ʿAin, Dec. 2014.
24 A map of the museum, available free to all visitors, is marked with arrows that confirm this route as the recommended one.
25 Zāyid, his brother Shakhbūṭ, and their father Sulṭān have their own portraits as well.
26 Khalīfa is Zāyid's eldest son. He was born in al-ʿAin in 1948. From 1966, when Zāyid became ruler of Abu Dhabi, until his father's death in 2004, Khalīfa was governor of al-ʿAin. In 2004, he became ruler of Abu Dhabi. Like the late King ʿAbdallāh of Saudi Arabia, he has no full brothers.
27 Before its consolidation into a city, al-ʿAin was one of a grouping of small settlements that included Rubayna.
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43 Ibid., 37.
44 Samin, Of Sand or Soil.
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48 Khāṭirī’s corroborating evidence for the Quḍāʿa lineage is a line of Emirati oral poetry recited by a purported early nineteenth-century Banī Yās leader, which links the Yās b. Aḥmad mentioned in the Dunn document to the ancient ancestor Quḍāʿa through what Khāṭirī’s Emirati critics consider to be a convoluted and far-fetched chain of ancestors. al-Khāṭirī, Awthaq al-Maʿāyīr, 86.
49 Author interview, Abu Dhabi, Sept. 2010.
50 Echoing Shryock's experience in Jordan, one Emirati historian implored me to erase the handwritten notes I was taking when discussing the key points of the Awthaq controversy. Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination, 148.
51 Author interview, ʿAjmān, Jan. 2014.
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57 Author interview, Sharjah, Dec. 2014.
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