In the 1960s, local workers in the Arabic-speaking Gulf participated in a series of strikes. In the case of strikes that occurred in 1963 Abu Dhabi, workers went on strike in order to improve their working conditions and to express their dissatisfaction with Sheikh Shakhbut’s policies. These strikes contributed to the instability at the end of Sheikh Shakhbut’s reign and the transition to the reign of Sheikh Zayed. While the strikes were important for internal politics in Abu Dhabi, the immediate impetus for these strikes was the firing of workers from not only Abu Dhabi, but also Yemen. During these strikes, workers from all over the Gulf formed a united front through articulating an intra-regional worker identity that transcended territorial boundaries. This type of intra-regional identity was not confined to Abu Dhabi and similar strikes occurred in Qatar and Bahrain in the 1960s. This paper will consider the how tribal affiliation and regional solidarity moved through and despite the administrative borders of the Arabic-speaking Gulf and enabled worker collective action. During the Gulf strikes of the 1960s, workers used kinship and exchange relations as the foundation of solidarity and political action. For workers, these strikes moved beyond the borders of the nation and were possible only through regional solidarity. I argue that during these strikes Abu Dhabi locals made a claim for a Gulf network that moved fluidly across state boundaries, and the networks defined by the workers were not confined to the national boundaries. In doing so, these logics of belonging disrupted the oil industry. In order to deter additional strikes, I find the British administrations and oil companies’ management worked to remove politics from the oilfields. This evacuation of politics included restructuring the workforce to include more South Asians and other foreigners. In order to understand this process and its effects, I will explore the politics of the worksite and the subsequent changes to employment in the Gulf States. The result will elucidate how historic worker action impacted contemporary maps of belonging.

Ever since the arrival of the oil companies (with their technicians and advisors) in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s, the foreigner has played a critical role in the way local Arab populations identify themselves, understand community, and express belonging. Indeed, identity, community, and belonging have been re-fashioned with contact with the foreigner and his insertions in Gulf society. With the creation of national states in the Peninsula, the ubiquity and dependence on the foreigner has not only persisted, but also grown exponentially. Most notable among them are the masses of poor, mostly Asian, migrant laborers, who have built these countries and today constitute between 25 and 85 percent of the population in GCC states. It can be argued, borrowing from Fanon and Bhabha, that in response to the European at the inception of the oil era, mimicry – the donning of their white masters’ masks – was adopted by Gulf Arabs in the hope of being acknowledged. Nonetheless, mimcry eventually resulted in a fractured identity: one that was “almost the same, but not quite.” How, though, has the subsequent encounter with the poor migrant laborer -- on whom the Gulf Arab is equally, if not more dependent -- impacted identity and the elaboration of community? Finally, how do the encounters with two very different types of foreigners – the European, with his power, wealth, and knowledge, and the Asian migrant with little apart from his labor power – intersect in identity-formation and the definition of community? I address these questions using case material from four GCC states – Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia – where I conducted field research including extensive interviews with nationals, expatriates and migrant laborers. In contrast to the more common focus of identity studies on religious or tribal affiliations, or sedentary versus nomadic lifestyles, I explore the ways in which the ubiquity of and dependence on foreign labor, since the early days of state formation and the oil economy, have been integral to the construction of identity among nationals. I argue that the deliberate exclusion – indeed, invisibility – of the migrant laborer (many of whom happen to be Muslim) is a means to both solidify identity and (re-)shape community and belonging, in keeping with the national project of ruling families, in the contemporary period. Furthermore, by underscoring hierarchy and privilege, it serves as an antidote to the uncomfortable ambiguity of being “almost the same, but not quite” vis-à-vis the ‘other’ (white) foreigner.

When Mina, an Iranian, met Mohammed, an Emirati, at a university in Dubai, she was not aware that he originally was from the Lârestan region of southern Iran, whose parents were naturalised Emirati. The region of Lârestan maintained continuous relations with the southern shore of the Persian Gulf well before the 20th century, most notably in the form of migratory flows which had their influence on both home and host countries. Upon the creation of the Arab states along the southern shore of the Gulf, the majority of individuals originating from the region were granted the newly founded states’ nationality. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), after the creation of the country in 1971, and particularly in Dubai, new migrants originating from cities throughout Iran now defined as “temporary workers” joined those already settled in place. Mina and Mohammed falling in love with each other under this context, the discussions around forms of belonging, family relations and women’s role in society came to nurture their bond and soon affected it to the extent of jeopardizing the relationship. Through the portrait of this love story in Dubai, based on fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013, this paper will attempt to analyse on one hand how transnational relations between the two shores of the Gulf, encountered by Mohammed’s family, and to certain degree by himself, followed by the experience of nation building in the UAE after 1971, forming his vision of an Emirati citizen and his relation to the home country of his parents. On the other hand, how Mina discovered a different Iran through her relationship with Mohammed, that of the periphery, and its continuation beyond national borders, in Dubai. Love, as a form of social relations, is used here to help us understand how national and transnational identities are negotiated in the everyday life of the now citizens of the modern nation-states in the Gulf region.

Since its inception as a nation state from 1970 onwards, Oman’s expanding heritage industry and market for crafts and sites – exemplified by the boom in museums, exhibitions, cultural festivals and the restoration of more than a hundred forts, castles and citadels – fashions a distinctly national geography and a territorial imaginary. Material forms - ranging from old mosques and shari’a manuscripts to restored forts now museumified, old living settlements, national symbols such as the coffee pot or the dagger (khanjar) and archaeological landscapes - saturate the landscape and become increasingly ubiquitous as part of a public and visual memorialization of the past. Material forms, and their circulation through institutional techniques of education and mass publicity assume a repetitive aesthetic pedagogy that cultivate every-day civic virtues, new modes of religiosity and forms of marking time, defining the ethical actions necessary to becoming an Omani modern through the framework of tradition. I argue that this is not a matter of merely instilling uniformity of behaviour but of creating the ethical conditions in which a modern public domain for creativity and deliberation can be created. I explore how the realm of heritage is approached not merely in its ability to instil ideologies, thus downgrading its truth to a function of state power and manipulation, but in its potential to shape the perceptual habits, emotional affects and ethical sensibilities of its audience.