The edited volume Transnational Connections in the Arab Gulf has played an important role in identifying a certain disconnect between the transnational foundations of the major Gulf ports and the contemporary processes of what Madawi Al-Rasheed calls “localizing the transnational.” In an effort to articulate a unified local identity, emphasis has been placed on the Arab origins of the Gulf population. For the Gulf nationals with transnational origins, this has led to particular practices to assert their belonging to the national community. This paper takes the Kuwaiti Houla community, (Sunni migrants from Iran) as a case study of one transnational community that has redefined itself in such a way that expands its cultural capital within Kuwaiti society. Employing interviews and recent popular publications such as Tarikh ‘Arab al-Houla and Tarikh ‘Arab al-Houla wa al-‘Utub it will look specifically at the emergent historical narrative of the relationship between the Houla and territories in the Gulf. The paper will explore Houla attempts to legitimate their “belonging” in the region with regard to their origins, the conditions of their emigration from the south of Iran, and finally their contribution to the early settlement in Kuwait. In doing so the paper illuminates specific ways in which the Houla have adapted themselves to the dominant culture. Finally in an attempt to texturize this narrative, the research also takes a quantitative approach towards understanding this social navigation by analyzing the trends in naming patterns (as found in voter registration records) of two Houla families in the past century. Theoretically this paper explores the conceptualization of both citizenship and nationality in Kuwait and how that relationship has changed over time at particular historical intervals. It will argue that the Houla have undergone and continue to undergo processes of boundary dissolution, reconstruction and affirmation that at once incorporate them into the Kuwaiti nation and yet maintain internal group solidarity and distinction. It will discuss the appeal of pursuing these two seemingly contradictory strategies in light of changing ideas of what it means to be a Kuwaiti.

This presentation takes as its starting point an interpretation of the UAE (and Trucial States before it) as a borderless, transnational space. Most UAE land borders are undemarcated, disputed, or have only recently been subjected to state control. Mobility of labor, finance, expertise, and goods has profoundly shaped urban and rural spaces in what is now the UAE. Many Emiratis can trace family heritage to locations throughout the Gulf, Indian Ocean, and Arab world. Yet research suggests that in the 1990s many Emirati citizens began to claim a strong national identity, the contours and content of which are the subject of much debate, contestation, and anxiety. This anxiety is manifested in concerns about loss of heritage and historical memory, marriage to non-Emiratis, the decline of the Arabic language in daily life, and the foreign composition of the UAE’s labor force. How has a nationalist discourse emerged from the anational, borderless milieu of the Lower Gulf? For the most part, scholars have understood contemporary Emirati identity in opposition to foreign influences; this presentation seeks to understand them as mutually constitutive. This presentation argues that a strong generational difference exists in how Emiratis relate to transnational mobility, and hypothesizes that the emergence of Emirati national identity coincided with state-led projects of shaping national space and inventing an indigenous Emirati culture. This is based on a close reading and textual analysis of several memoirs and oral history collections, including Mohammed al-Fahim’s From Rags to Riches, Easa Saleh al-Gurg’s Wells of Memory, Ayash Yehyawi’s Awal Manzil, and Abdelrahman Abdullah’s Al-Imarat fi Dhakirat Ibna’iha, which will be contrasted with current ethnographic work on Emirati identity. Their publication coincided with a boom in Emirati history-writing that began in the 1990s, but their narratives end in the 1970s. This endpoint suggests a discontinuity between historical memory of a highly mobile past and Emiratis’ present identification with a national territorial space; a shift which seems to have occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s. By that time, oil wealth had financed the development of infrastructure binding together a national space, the settlement of formerly mobile populations, and the education of a generation of students in national schools. Locating this shift in the 1990s rather than the 1970s suggests a new periodization of the UAE’s history, and engages academic literature on state formation, sedentarization, and relationships between space and identity formation.

This paper deals with how Islam, Muslims and The Middle East are depicted in Swedish public policy debates between 1975-2010. The paper argues that the Swedish state and the political parties through various strategies have tried to administer, channel and construct an acceptable version of Islam that incorporates moderate values, is secularized and liberal. At the same time the image of the good Muslim versus the bad Muslim has been politically constructed to comply with Swedish values and political culture. The political construction of Islam and Muslims in the Swedish context furthermore has had a strong influence on Swedish policies towards the Middle East and opinions about the prospect of democratisation in the region as well as gender equality. The paper draws on empirical material which includes major government documents, official government inquiries, parliamentary debates, bills, committee work and proposals for parliamentary resolutions. The analysis draws upon a combination of discourse theory, especially theories on governmentality and Postcolonial theory concerning representation, stereotypes, orientalism and imitation. The paper will demonstrate the shifts that have occurred in the discourses concerning Islam, Muslims and the Middle East in public policy debates. In the initial two periods of 1975-1980 and 1980-1990 Islam and Muslims were mostly related to questions concerning practical issues like education and religious slaughter. During the 1990s the shift included a focus on independent Islamic schools and a more explicit focus on perceived problems related to Islam and Muslim immigration in Swedish society. During the period between 2001-2010 there was another shift that included focus on questions regarding Islamism, islamophobia, anti-Semitism among Muslims and gender inequalities in the Middle East. The paper identifies four different discourses that compete to define and explain Islam, Muslims and the Middle East within the Swedish public policy debates. The first is a discourse on integration; the second concerns equality; the third focuses on security; and the fourth is a discourse on homogenization. This illustrates how the political construction of Islam and Muslims has changed over time from dealing with practical issues and social inclusion to dealing with which values that are considered to be unacceptable and therefore possible to exclude from the Swedish society and which values concerning democracy and gender equality that are perceived as possible to achieve in the Middle East.