2 INVISIBLE GAS
In his analysis of the petroleum industry’s footprint in the villages of the Niger Delta in Africa, Michael Watts (2004, 251) discerns a “miserable, undisciplined, decrepit, and corrupt form of ‘petro-capitalism,’ ” a concept he compellingly delineates in his critical assessment. The form of capitalism he observes is harnessed by the petroleum complex he also identifies. That complex consists of an intricate conglomeration of arrangements, laws, institutions, corporations, and security forces conjured in those states found atop our planet’s remaining subterranean reservoirs of hydrocarbon energy. One can see evidence of this petroleum complex in Qatar and the other Gulf states, although in its Arabian manifestation that complex is largely indiscernible from the state itself. Moreover, most of the various components of the petroleum complex portrayed by Watts have been trimmed, organized, managed, or otherwise assuaged by the Gulf states so that they appear as nothing more than another example on the continuum of contemporary bureaucratic and institutional normalcy in the neoliberal era.
This elision of the forces at work in the Gulf states is only enhanced by the nature and geography of Qatari extraction. Qatar sits atop one of the world’s most productive fields of natural gas (see figure 3). Most of that gas is located offshore, beneath the peninsular nation’s territorial waters. The gas itself is invisible to the human eye. Yet while the Nigerian villagers Watts observed lived amid the pollution and the nocturnal glow of an industry engaged in extracting the delta’s precious resource, to the residents of Qatar—that is, to citizens, migrant workers, accompanying families, and assorted others—the industry itself is largely invisible, like the gas it extracts. Offshore and beyond view from the city, gas is pulled from the ground and brought to the surface of the sea. It is then relocated, processed, and liquified, thereby allowing large quantities to be transported in a single ship. The gas is then loaded into tankers, and once those ships exit the Straits of Hormuz and scurry past those portions of our planet’s seas within reach of Somali pirates, that gas has truly reached the global marketplace. Fascinatingly, few junctures of the productive process in Qatar require land, and almost all of the requisite production process occurs at some distance from the city. In terms of Watts’s notion of petro-capitalism and the petroleum complex that it conjures, Doha—the city itself—is the primary manifestation and the sole edifice of an invisible commodity whose production and departure to the global marketplace occurs offstage.
FIGURE 3. An oilfield pipeline gate valve, similar to those that Qatar’s invisible gas must pass through. This image is of an exhibit at the National Museum of Qatar. Photograph by the author, 2020.
Qatar’s contemporary wealth is a stunning historical turnabout for the desert state. For millennia, including much of the last century, Qatar was a mere footnote in the world’s concerns with Arabia and with the broader Middle East. The peoples of Arabia endured colonialism in the long Ottoman period, and then a sort of quasi-colonialism in the British era in which the region and the nation-states carved from it were principally cogoverned as “protectorates”—as bureaucratic addenda to British India. The Arab Gulf states achieved independence in the latter portion of the twentieth century, although several expressed misgivings about independence and the impending British departure. But independence and the financial boon resulting from the OPEC embargo quickly resulted in a fertile soil in which nationalist ambitions blossomed anew. In the 1970s, Kuwait shined and Bahrain seemed ascendant; beginning in the 1980s, Dubai emerged as a place people around the world recognized and knew. Qatar’s emergence into the global theater of attention commenced in the late 1990s as its vast reservoirs of gas finally began to reach the global marketplace. Gauging Qatar’s level of wealth on a per-capita basis, the peninsular nation most closely resembles the United Arab Emirates to the south; Kuwait’s wealth and relatively small citizenry also place it in this ambit. But these small states are dwarfed by the demographic titans in the neighborhood: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, adjacent to Qatar, and mighty Iran, just across the waters of the Persian Gulf.
In many of the scholarly conversations focused on the peoples and societies of the Arabian Peninsula, substantial effort is devoted to understanding the unique historical experiences of the respective Gulf states. These conversations have been rich and informative, and remain so, but that sustained discussion concerning each nation’s historical peculiarities often obscures the parallel journeys these states followed into the contemporary era, as well as the cadences observable in those states’ respective histories. The similarities run deep. Despite notable differences and historical particularities, these states’ histories are woven together by geography, culture, environment setting, ethnicity, the presence of lucrative hydrocarbon resources, a similar experiences with the Ottoman and British empires, and by quite a bit more beyond that. Numerous families, clans, and tribes maintain social relations across national borders, and several of the ruling families trace their ancestry to related tribes.
The Gulf states also share a history—again, from the vantage point of the longue durée—enmeshed and interconnected with the Indian Ocean world. This historical experience contrasts sharply with the insularity by which the various peoples of the Arabian Peninsula are typically characterized. The conclusions I draw at the end of this book suggest the vestiges of that insularity are dialectically entwined with the peninsula’s sustained interconnectedness to this Indian Ocean world. That interconnectivity is tied to the historical mobilities of the peoples of the peninsula. In the interior of the Arabian Peninsula, bedouin tribes amazingly sustained themselves for millennia in perhaps the most trying environment on the planet, and their mobility was an essential feature of their endurance. The port-dwelling, sea-focused hadhar Arabs built and occupied the busy ports on the seashore, and for much of history shuttled pearls into a regional trade network of great significance in the Indian Ocean world and beyond. These preexisting mobilities and interconnections grew and changed in the colonial era, but they confirm the fact that for millennia the Arabian Peninsula has been a busy juncture at a cosmopolitan crossroads (Onley and Khalaf 2006; Bishara 2017; Roberts 2021).
The GCC states are most recognized for their hydrocarbon wealth, and for the global prominence the afterglow of that wealth has allowed them to forge. Qatar, the focus of my research for more than a decade, is an excellent example. The peninsular state has an extraordinarily high per capita GDP, and by some measures the small state also contains the densest accumulation of millionaires in the contemporary world (Davis 2013). The situation is similar in the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. A century ago, however, the foundations of the preoil regional economy were annihilated when the Japanese entrepreneur Mikimoto Kokichi first pioneered the commercial production of cultured pearls. This resulted in the rapid devaluation of the region’s pearls, and amid a broader global depression and the enduring presence of the British colonial apparatus, these were difficult and penurious decades. The Arab Gulf states became independent in the second half of the twentieth century, and their hydrocarbon reserves, conceived by many as a gift from Allah, began to elevate these desert societies to unprecedented heights. Although scholars often emphasize differences, numerous factors—small indigenous populations, the task of crafting new nationalisms, the presence of that hydrocarbon wealth, monarchical leadership cast in the tribal form, and the rapid infrastructural and social development characteristic of the past five decades—comprise the foundational and obvious parity observable in the historical experiences these states share.
To outsiders, the citizens of the Gulf states appear extraordinarily homogeneous, even uniform. This perception is exacerbated by the steady convergence of khaleeji fashion and style around a singular and gender-bifurcated mode. Despite appearances and fashion, these populations are somewhat heterogeneous. As previously noted, the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula include the bedu, or those who trace their lineage to the nomadic pastoral peoples of the subcontinental interior, and the hadhar, or those who trace their lineage to the merchant and seafaring peoples of the port towns and minor cities. But that is only one of many sociohistorical fissures and differences that comprise the citizenry. There are both Sunni and Shi’a components of the indigenous population. Of the Persian immigrants, both old and new, some claim an Arab ethnicity, and others do not. The abd component of the population trace their ancestry to the slaves brought to the Arabian Peninsula from Africa and are mostly assimilated into the indigenous structures of social organization.1 Another former slave population was drawn from Baluchistan, an ethnic region now split between Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. These vectors of difference, and more like them, interlace with the revitalized conception of the tribe and tribal belonging on the Qatari Peninsula. This tribalism provides a social form more specific than ethnicity but more encompassing than the notion of an extended family predominant in the West (or even in South Asia). For citizens, these aspects of identity construction are cast against the backdrop of a proportionally vast population of foreign residents, workers, and visitors.
Amid this diversity, one of the central features of society and state in Arabia is the ongoing construction, development, and maintenance of a coherent sense of national belonging. In most regional cases, the impulse for a relatively new nation to determine and elucidate a shared history has simultaneously affirmed the legitimacy of the ruling families and the tribal hierarchies that the British established to lead the protectorates and proto-states carved from the Arabian Peninsula. Significant portions of these states’ contemporary activities can be tied to the articulation of the narratives to which these nationalisms are pinned. Hosting global mega-events invigorates this sense of nationalism. Constructing spectacular cities asserts singular, coherent nationalisms to a global audience. National museums articulate these narratives in great detail and specificity. But thinking of both Clifford Geertz and Benedict Anderson, the nationalist narrative at the heart of these processes is also a story Qataris are telling themselves about themselves.2 The energetic “heritage industry” so active in the region—an industry coalescing in the form of the aforementioned museums, in particular—facilitates the distillation and codification of these singular national narratives.3 Foreigners are employed throughout the heritage industry that’s arisen around the ongoing construction of these national identities, and increasingly seems to be evoking a collective nostalgia for the premodern past.4 Simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically, the activities of this heritage industry simultaneously project a refined, cosmopolitan, and thoroughly modern image to a global audience, an ongoing act that also quietly asserts the benevolent leadership of the ruling families, whose role at the apex of these relations is to guide progress, to choose tastefully, and to choose well.5
Migration and the Shape of the State
Migration has had a deep impact on the shape of Qatari society and has left an indelible impact on the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. Although the topic of migration was introduced in earlier chapters of this book, my mission here is to further illuminate this aspect of the peninsula’s history, and to better articulate how migration shaped the relationship between state and society in Qatar. It is important to recollect that mobility and interconnection with regional and global trade networks were already key features in the social foundations and traditions of the peoples who inhabited these arid regions by the twentieth century. The bedu of the peninsula’s interior relied on mobility as a pastoral adaptation to the arid environment, and via the camel, had built livelihoods around long distance trade with the interior portions of the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. The hadhar, or coastal urbanites, meanwhile, had cultivated livelihoods tethered to the sea and the mobilities that it allowed. In the intertwined history of these two livelihood systems, trade and exchange were always central features, but notably, neither livelihood system was particularly focused on the incorporation of migrants and the facilitation of migration to serve these modes of production.
One notable exception to this assertion is the trade in human slaves. As Hopper (2015) noted, the rags-to-riches narrative oftentimes used to describe the arrival of petroleum wealth in the twentieth century can be misleading, as it obscures the region’s increasing interconnections with the global marketplace that predated the hydrocarbon era (see also Bishara 2017; Roberts 2021). In the preoil period of the early twentieth century, as Qatar navigated the imperial presence of the Ottoman and British empires, the production and export of pearls and dates increasingly connected the region to the vicissitudes of the global marketplace. Labor power was in great demand. Although Britain had made the abolition of slavery an increasingly central feature of its imperial presence in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Qatar was a protectorate, not a colony, and the whole of the region remained largely out of focus to these distant empires. In that context, and with labor demands tied to the production of pearls and dates, the slave trade remained economically vital to the regional economy. In his estimation of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean of the nineteenth century, Bishara (2017, 47) concludes that the presence of slaves “infused every transaction, every promise to deliver, and every line in the ledger book.”6 Qatar was no exception: under Ottoman rule in 1905, “Africans” comprised an estimated 22 percent of the population of Qatar—a surprisingly large figure for an era in which the primary source of slaves had again switched back to Baluchistan and other Eurasian sources (Hopper 2015, 9). It would be nearly five more decades until slavery was finally abolished in Qatar in 1952.
It is analytically conceivable that the legacy of slavery in Arabia helped normalize the idea of looking outside the region for the proletarian elements of the labor force. But the gravitational core of contemporary labor migration did not come into view until the petroleum era commenced in full. Oil was discovered in Bahrain in 1932, but the industry’s vast expansion would await the conclusion of World War II. In the decades following the war, the region’s burgeoning hydrocarbon industry drew labor foremost from other Middle Eastern states. In the early 1970s, Qatar and several of its neighbors were newly independent of Britain, and in response to Israel’s 1973 war with several of its Arab neighbors, the ensuing OPEC embargo elevated GCC states’ profit levels to unprecedented heights. It was in this context—newly independent states flush with hydrocarbon profits—that the political-economic trajectory of Qatar and its neighbors was solidified, and the gravitational core for transnational migration was established. In Omar Alshehabi’s analysis (2015, 10–12), this trajectory coalesced around the construction of the “petro-modernist state,” configured foremost around the objective of deeper integration in the global capitalist system.7 It was against this backdrop that Qatar and the other GCC states began to increasingly turn to South Asian labor sources. In the first two decades of the new millennium, South Asian labor predominates throughout the GCC, and this is particularly true at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. In our 2012 survey of low-income migrants in Qatar, some 89 percent of the migrants earning less than QR 2000 (US$549) hailed from South Asia, with another 5 percent arriving from the Philippines; at this income level, the largest remaining Arab component in our survey were Egyptians, comprising only 3 percent of our representative sample (Gardner et al. 2013).
One manifestation of this petro-modernist state and this history is the formation of the rentier state, a theorization descriptive of those states whose productive income is almost entirely derived from the external sale of a natural resource. Qatar sells almost all of the natural gas it produces to others in the global marketplace. Rentier regimes—prototypically arranged, like Qatar, so that the state itself is the primary recipient of externally derived wealth—maintain the economic and political satisfaction of their citizenries through the distribution of wealth to those citizen-subjects. In Qatar, the primary channel for that distribution is through public sector employment.8 Rather than comprehensive engagement in economically productive activities for work, citizens’ “primary economic role is confined instead to being consumers and beneficiaries of state-distributed or privately generated rent” (Alshehabi 2015). Nearly all Qatari citizens work in the public sector; however, the millions of noncitizen labor migrants present on the Qatari Peninsula predominate in the private sector, while foreign labor continues to stock countless positions in the public sector as well.
In a sense, the invisible gas that drives Qatari wealth and development is at the core of the state and the migration system that is grown and evolved around it. That invisible gas is also deeply implicated in the city itself, a topic which I turn to next.
A City in History
Although people were present on the Qatari Peninsula for time immemorial, the city of Doha first came into recognized existence in the early nineteenth century. Initially nothing more than a pair of villages on the shores of the Persian Gulf, the city was conjured around the lucrative pearl fishery of the adjacent shallow sea, as well as by the trade and interconnections that the sea enabled. The town grew steadily in the remainder of the nineteenth century, and various districts and neighborhoods evolved, shifted, and merged over the intervening era. Estimates concerning the middle and late nineteenth century indicate that 4,000 to 6,000 people resided in what we now think of as Doha, and that number would double with the pearling boom that commenced at the end of that century. Just decades later, however, the international market for pearls collapsed, and with the subsequent global economic depression that ensued thereafter, the city remained in a sort of stasis for decades into the twentieth century. The city’s population would not begin to grow again until the 1950s, just after the first shipment of crude oil left the peninsula (Fletcher and Carter 2017). In the ensuing decade, Doha grew in leaps and bounds: people who had abandoned the city in the difficult decades of the early twentieth century began to return, Qatari tribes from elsewhere on the peninsula were drawn to Doha and all it promised, and wave after wave of migrants from outside Qatar began to settle in the city.
Describing the seaside village of Doha in 1949, the Qatari journalist and author Nasser Othman (1984, 1) noted that “The village had developed by a natural process without any thought for such modern ideas as town planning.” But this “natural process” was not the unbridled chaos that the urban Orientalists of yesteryear once sought to portray.9 The archaeologists Richard Fletcher and Robert Carter (2017) convincingly portray a set of twelve “structural principles” visible in Doha’s historical urban growth—principles tied to the social, political, economic, and environmental context in which the port cities of the Arabian littoral emerged.10 In addition to items like the importance of the sea, the general climate of the region, and the walls, forts, and towers of a defensive posture typically woven into the urban landscapes of the region, their evidence points to a constellation of social features characteristic of these cities. These include the separation of residential districts from zones of economic activity, the “compartmentalisation of residence along kinship and community lines,” and the integral role of both central administration and patronage systems in the societies that built and inhabited these port cities (Fletcher and Carter 2017). Although the preoil town was perhaps not planned, Doha and neighboring port cities were coherently structured by these forces which, together, seem to suggest a distinctively khaleeji urban tradition connecting the urbanity of the present with the city’s urban past.
Cities everywhere in the world are envisioned as spaces where diverse and different people come into contact with one another. This pluralism, and the demographic diversity that underlies it, is integral to the very definition of the urban milieu. Although Qatar and other Gulf societies have often been portrayed as insular and homogenous places (and sometimes these are even self-portrayals), a sustained line of scholarship has clarified that port cities of the Arabian littoral have been waypoints in the Indian Ocean world for the entirety of their existence (Gupta 2008; Fuccaro 2009; Bishara 2017; Roberts 2021).11 In his frequently reproduced description of the port of Manama, just to the north of Qatar in Bahrain, for example, W. G. Palgrave (1866, 211–212) penned the following description in 1866:
Mixed with the indigenous population are numerous strangers and settlers, some of whom have been established here for many generations back, attracted from other lands by the profits of either commerce or the pearl fishery, and still retaining more or less the physiognomy and garb of their native countries. Thus the gay-coloured dress of the southern Persian, the saffron-stained vest of “Oman, the white robe of Nejed, and the striped gown of Bagdad, are often to be seen mingling with the light garments of Bahreyn, its blue and red turban, its white silk-fringed cloth worn Banian fashion round the waist, and its frock-like overall; while a small but unmistakable colony of Indians, merchants by profession, and mainly from Guzerat, Cutch, and their vicinity, keep up here all their peculiarities of costume and manner, and live among the motley crowd, ‘among them, but not of them.”
This captivating quote illuminates the circumstances and context in which these cities and societies developed. While that context was a shared condition, Doha was a smaller mercantile entity than Manama, Kuwait, or Dubai, and through the machinations of its leaders, a century ago the city was less suffused with the South Asian demographic presence that British interests had helped cultivate elsewhere in the region (Fletcher and Carter 2017, 459).
Like those neighboring cities, Doha was indelibly shaped by the wealth generated from its oil and gas resources. Although many contemporary scholars seek to emphasize the continuities that connect the pre- and postoil eras in the GCC states, the resulting monies did have a clear, significant, and notable impact on the built environment.12 As Fletcher and Carter convey, “the first direct oil revenues (beginning in 1950) had an immediate effect, and, within three years, Doha’s town plan had begun to change, with the appearance of tarmacked roads and the construction of new planned districts” (Fletcher and Carter 2017, 449; Hay 1959, 110–111).13 To that list, we might add an airstrip, court buildings, a variety of new administrative offices for the state, headquarters for the police, new schools, a power plant, and much more. One of those administrative offices was the Ministry of Public Works, which charged with guiding infrastructural development and new housing. The construction of social housing emerged as a key vocation of the Qatari state, and under the guidance and consultation of foreign planners, the city sprawled out into the open desert (Nagy 1997). Ring roads B and C—beltways that encircled the urban core of Doha at the time of their construction—are from this era and remain important features of the center city today. Additionally, in this era, the Qatari state began to “reclaim” land from the sea, thereby expanding or moving the available waterfront.
The central city grew into shape during the apex period of architectural modernism, and in the aging city center one can still encounter the architectural vestiges of this era tucked between the postmodern hotels, office buildings, trophy museums, and urban developments that now crowd the corniche (Gardner 2021a). In the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, the aging city center was residentially abandoned by Qatari citizens as they dispersed to the suburbs. For Qatari citizens, the aspirational ideal shifted from the semi-private fareej—those aging districts or neighborhoods populated along “kinship and community lines”—to the stand-alone late modernist villa surrounded by a high wall enclosing a verdant garden (Fletcher and Carter 2017, 449). The sociologist Khaldoon Al-Naqeeb (1990, 91) had once noted that the periphery of the cities of the region was occupied by “something resembling a decrepit lumpen proletariat in air-conditioned ghettoes on the fringes of the ‘metropolitan petroleum cities’.” But after citizens’ suburban migration in the waning decades of the twentieth century, the aging and modestly modernist neighborhoods at the urban core of the city were abandoned to the burgeoning transnational proletariat at work on the peninsula.14 As a result, they became ghettoes, albeit vibrant and transnational. At the outset of the twenty-first century, however, the pendulum has swung back yet again: a variety of urban redevelopment projects have sought to revitalize the aging city center, and the legion of foreign workers now mostly resides at the periphery of the city. True to the nature of a palimpsest, nearly all these urban eras of the past are still visible in some form, discernible via an urban drift through the dense city center (Gardner 2021a).
Although Doha continues to sprawl into the surrounding desert, the ongoing revitalization of the city’s dense urban core is heralded by an array of gargantuan projects remaking central districts. Souk Waqif, the labyrinthine central market both restored and improved to the threshold of simulacra, is located on the same grounds where it always stood and remains one of Qatar’s most popular attractions for residents and visitors alike. Nearby is the Museum of Islamic Art, designed by the starchitect I. M. Pei on a parcel of “reclaimed” land just offshore from the city’s waterfront corniche. Adjacent to the souk is Msheireb Downtown Doha, a thirty-one-hectare super-block consisting of more than one hundred buildings. The urban redevelopment is promoted as “the world’s first sustainable downtown regeneration project” (Msheireb Properties 2021). For years, gargantuan machines tunneled the Metro’s now-completed pathway under the city center. These projects, and countless others like them, point not just to a surplus of capital but to the increasingly prominent role of the city as a symbol. Certainly, Doha is a capital city, and thereby symbolically represents the Qatari people to a global audience. But the city is also an architectural trophy case, and thereby falls into a consumerist sort of calculus. Against the backdrop of that global audience, the trophies in the city resonate in a cosmopolitan index of architectural taste. All of this points to the key connections between state, city, and society: as Fuccaro (2009, 3) once noted with succinct clarity, “Gulf metropolises have become instruments of statecraft, tools to promote state formation.”
Concluding Thoughts
In part, this brief overview of the political economy that results from extractive industries is intended to infuse the reader’s understanding of the forthcoming points in this text. At the same time, it also speaks to the political economic foundation of my understanding of society and culture not just in Qatar but in all human societies. Much as Marvin Harris (1979) contended some decades ago, I also believe that we assemble, arrange, and adjust our intricate cultures and our hierarchical societies around the material bedrock of collective human existence. This seems clear in a city that is doubly yoked by Allah’s grand gift of hydrocarbon wealth; the city is built with the profits of that extraction, and thereby yoked to its service as a repository for the surplus capital generated by the extraction of valuable hydrocarbons, as David Harvey (2008) would suggest. But in unfolding into its current shape, Doha is also yoked to the urban infrastructure that humans’ dependence on hydrocarbon energy has produced. Automobiles have indelibly shaped the city, and airplanes facilitate the mobilities around which Doha is configured. In Qatar, the whole of the city is fueled by invisible gas.