HADHAR AND BADU: WHO THEY ARE AND HOW EACH CATEGORY PERCEIVES THE OTHER

In present-day popular speech, the term hadhar designates Kuwaitis whose forefathers lived in Kuwait before the launch of the oil era (1946) and worked as traders, sailors, fishermen, and pearl divers. In contrast, the term badu designates a specific group of newcomers: these are immigrants, mostly from Saudi Arabia, who used to live on animal pastoralism; they moved to Kuwait between 1960 and 1980, after Kuwait had become an independent, oil-exporting nation, and have been granted Kuwaiti nationality over the years since then.⁴

Ever since the 1960s, hadhar discontent elicited by the badu's presence has been a recurrent theme in Kuwait.⁵ However, it became a lot more explicit from the late 1980s onward in tandem with the increase in the number of badu deputies in the National Assembly; anti-badu rhetoric peaked after the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, when some hadhar openly questioned the badu's loyalty to Kuwait.⁶

The hadhar claim that the badu are alien elements in Kuwaiti society. Arriving en masse from the desert in the 1960s and 1970s, they are said to have only one purpose in mind: to lay their hands on the welfare goods and services Kuwait could offer.⁷

It is claimed that instead of trying to integrate and adapt to Kuwaiti culture, they stubbornly hold on to their tribal ways: their women are veiled, kept at home, and held in ignorance; their children go barefoot and are allowed to roam the streets until late at night without any parental control. Having understood the advantages of the family allowance system, badu men supposedly practice polygamy and have scores of children as a way to increase their monthly income. Without education and professional skills, badu and their large families are looked upon as a heavy burden on the state for which the hadhar society has to pay. “My people have worked for three hundred years to build this society,” a male hadhar complained, “only to have these badu come and enjoy the fruit of their labour!” Not only are badu said to milk the state, but they are also accused of being loyal only to their tribes and tribal leaders. Kuwait—the nation-state—means nothing to them, it is alleged. Many carry two passports, Kuwaiti and Saudi, and live in Saudi Arabia all year long. They come here only to collect their monthly allowances and at election time to cast their votes for candidates of their own tribes, thus bearing the major responsibility for the growing conservatism in Kuwaiti society and politics. Hadhar are convinced that the badu do not have the interests of Kuwait at heart, only the interests of their tribes. To many hadhar, this concern with tribal connections is a major problem: they complain that the new immigrants bring with them a culture of “connections” (wasta) and nepotism based on particularistic identities. “In the early 1960s,” recalled a hadhar woman, “we were all Kuwaitis. No one ever asked which tribe you come from, let alone brag about their tribal origin. It is enough that we were from Kuwait. Today they all go around carrying tribal names to identify themselves and, based on this, they do each other mutual favours.” Combined with their tribal exclusiveness is a purported blind obedience toward the power holders, first and foremost the ruling family. The pre-oil history of Kuwait was to a large extent the history of a community with dual leadership, the al-Sabah sheikhs and the merchants.⁸ As a result, hadhar in general and the Sunni merchants in particular have a strong sense of political entitlement; a critical attitude toward the government is an important feature in the definition of hadhar identity. In contrast, badu are said to revere governmental authority and their attitude to the ruling family has been deprecatingly subsumed by several hadhar as “obsequious hand kissing.” Badu, they say, are brought in to serve the government's purposes, and as a result, Kuwaiti society is burdened with a growing number of naturalized citizens who plunder the national resources without making any contributions in return.

The badu's perception of the hadhar is, in my experience, much less clearly articulated—they do not spend the same amount of time speaking about hadhar—and on the whole, it is much more flattering and positive. Most badu do not contest the hadhar's legitimacy of belonging: Kuwait is rightfully theirs; they built this society. Conversely, it is asserted that the badu may be recently naturalized but, as true Northeastern tribes, their dirah or “tribal pastures” used to encompass this part of the peninsula and they therefore cannot be called strangers to Kuwait. Of interest, most badu agree with many of the cultural stereotypes assigned to them by hadhar. The difference is what the latter look upon as backwardness, the badu see as valuable qualities and practices. For example, my badu informants readily acknowledge that tribal ties are real enough but to them this is solidarity and not nepotism, and they would argue that tribal solidarity is what makes tribal society more caring, therefore, better than any other societies. As for their attitude toward Kuwait, they see no contradiction between devotion to the tribe and love of Kuwait. The badu claim that the hadhar also have multiple allegiances to Kuwait and to political ideologies such as ba

thism, Arab nationalism, communism, khomeinism, and so forth. It is pointed out that these ideological allegiances, which are all imported from the outside world, have led oppositional hadhar to attack the country's regime and the country's leaders, in words but occasionally also in deeds (e.g., bomb throwing and airplane hijacking in the 1980s). Moreover, if some badu carry two passports, they say, quite a few hadhar have the green card, which allows them to settle in the United States when the going gets rough in Kuwait. The badu also unabashedly defend what they call the “protected” position of badu women, which hadhar call “subordinate.” They pride themselves upon their conservative traditionalism and view the large badu families as a sign of physical vigor and social strength, not a symptom of backwardness. It is also a political asset because, thanks to this physical vigor, badu now make up 60 percent of the Kuwaiti population (excluding the foreign migrant workers). Their number gives them a voice that the hadhar cannot ignore. The badu shrug at accusations of abuse of the welfare-state, and say that they simply make use of their citizens' rights, as hadhar do. The truth, they say, is that the hadhar fear the dynamic competition of the badu. Furthermore, although admitting that they may not be as urbane as the hadhar, all the badu I have met categorically refute the description of badu as ignorant, unskilled, and uneducated. They point out that several departments of Kuwait University have a majority of students and a growing number of teachers with bedouin background. They are particularly proud that many Ph.D. holders are badu, whose parents were illiterate. Many second-generation badu immigrants declare that they feel as Kuwaiti as the hadhar, in fact some claim to belong in the hadhar category (“I was born and grew up in Kuwait, attended Kuwaiti schools, and work in the Kuwaiti state. That makes me a full-fledged Kuwaiti, that is a native of this city, that is a hadhar,” a man in his mid-twenties argued). They maintain their lifestyle is identical to that of any hadhar; and, if the hadhar do not acknowledge this, it is ultimately because they are unwilling to relinquish their dominant position in society. They are unwilling to share their social and economic privileges and are keen to preserve the distinction “hadhar/badu” to keep the badu out in the cold. Hadhar are said to be particularly unwilling to let badu enter the private sector, which is where large fortunes can be made, and to seek to restrict their job opportunities to the public sector, where they depend on a fixed salary paid by the state. Most hadhar refute these claims and would quote lists of badu names in private business to prove their point.

There are of course no monolithic hadhar or badu views on all these matters nor are all individual views always consistent. Some badu are keen to emphasize the discriminatory hadhar attitudes but would at the same time acknowledge that “this is after all their society.” Many agree that the cultural gap between the two categories is substantial, some explaining it in evolutionary terms: “The hadhar are today where we will be in ten, twenty years' time.” On the whole, badu are confident that the gap is narrowing quickly. Although there are hadhar who dismiss the hadhar–badu dichotomy altogether and insist that “we are all the same people,” the majority I have met are convinced that it would take many, many generations for the gap between hadhar and badu to close.

THE POLITICS OF CATEGORIZATION

Whereas hadhar and badu are used only in popular speech, they have their equivalents in legal texts and governmental statistics. Thus, the 1959 Nationality Law differentiates between Kuwaitis by origin (bi-l-asl) and Kuwaitis by naturalization (bi-l-tijanis). Among the “original” Kuwaitis are members of the ruling family and people whose forefathers were permanent residents in Kuwait from 1920. Among naturalized Kuwaitis are all who settled in Kuwait after 1920 and were granted nationality at a later stage. The category “naturalized Kuwaitis” includes Shi

a (mostly from Iran, but also from Southern Iraq and al-Hassa), a few Sunni Arabs from Iran (hawala) and other Middle Eastern countries, and a handful of Christian Arabs from Southern Iraq and Palestine. These naturalized citizens came to Kuwait before the country shed its status as a British protectorate and became an independent state in 1961. Although not all can trace their presence in Kuwait back to 1920, they are considered part and parcel of the hadhar community, because as traders, laborers, fishermen, and seamen, or as teachers and doctors (in the case of the Palestinians), they had all contributed to the economy and development of the town before independence. The overwhelming majority of naturalized Kuwaitis, meanwhile, consist of badu. Several formal features distinguish the badu from the naturalized hadhar. Almost all badu originate from what has been internationally recognized since 1932 as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (they were in other words Saudi subjects before they opted to become Kuwaiti citizens) and practically all are Sunni Muslim. The naturalized badu, thus, are culturally more homogeneous than the naturalized hadhar. Furthermore, their immigration, which occurred mainly in the 1960s and 1970s, after Kuwait's independence, was neither individual nor spontaneous but collective and encouraged by the Kuwaiti authorities.

⁹

The complex rationale for this policy can be reviewed only briefly here. There is little doubt that concern with demographic increase to strengthen Kuwait's viability in the face of Iraq's annexation threats¹⁰

was a crucial factor. However, the government also wished to build a pro-al-Sabah support base to counter the volatile merchant opposition and ensure continuity, especially after the introduction in 1962 of constitutional rule and limited parliamentary democracy.¹¹

Indeed, voting in the badu constituencies in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s showed consistent support for pro-government candidates¹²

compared to the more mixed results in the hadhar constituencies.¹³

Like the legal texts, the official statistics published by the Ministry of Planning support the popular distinction between hadhar and badu, without precisely using these terms. The governorates of Jahra and Ahmadi are sometimes described as al manatiq al-kharijiyya or the “outlying areas”, whereas the central governorates are known as al-manatiq al-dakhiliyya or “central areas.” Likewise, dwellings in Kuwait come in two types, the ordinary one, which has no specific name, and buyut sharqiyya, literally “Eastern houses” but officially translated as “traditional houses.” These houses are concentrated in the so-called outlying areas. The picture that emerges is that of a society divided into a central urban core and an outlying rural area, inhabited by two sociologically, if not ethnically, distinct categories, the hadhar and the badu. The concrete dividing line between the two social worlds is generally considered to be the Sixth Ringroad (see map). Between the First and the Fifth Rings lie the undisputedly “hadhar” neighborhoods. The area between the Fifth and the Sixth Rings is a zone of transition with a mixed population of hadhar, badu, and foreign migrants. The area south of the Sixth Ringroad was, until recently, “badu territory.”

¹⁴

Only a few years ago, no hadhar would have dreamed of buying land or settling down in this area. Since the late 1990s, however, hadhar families (many of them Shi

a) have received government housing in the new residential area of Qorain, where they live side by side with badu families.

¹⁵

Because of lack of space, many young hadhar Kuwaitis can no longer find housing in the traditional hadhar neighborhoods in the heart of Kuwait City and have to take up residence beyond the Sixth Ringroad. Few, however, would consider living South of the Seventh Ringroad, and in 2005 the suburbs of Ahmadi and Fahaheel were still undisputably badu areas.

It must be pointed out that the term hadhar or town dweller is part of the traditional bedouin vocabulary. Urban Kuwaitis do not use it as a term of self-reference. When they need to emphasize their collective identity as against the badu, they would simply speak of “the Kuwaitis” or ahl al-sur, “the people from within the wall,” in reference to the mud wall that surrounded the town in the old days and protected it from desert raids. Although demolished in the 1950s the wall is still a powerful trope in the discursive construction of hadhar identity, as the official division of Kuwait into manatiq dakhiliyya and manatiq kharijiyya clearly indicates: inside and outside are concepts that exist only in relation to a dividing line or a wall. In naming the badu areas in terms that remind of their original status as outsiders, the state contributes to keeping alive the perception of difference between hadhar and badu and the battery of cultural images that goes with it.

Yet, the role of the authorities in this matter is ambiguous. In Kuwait, sects and tribes, two forms of community that powerfully challenge the unity of the nation-state, do not figure prominently in official public discourse. References to a person's tribal or sectarian belonging are rarely made in the media, for instance.¹⁶

The only time tribes and sects are mentioned in newspapers is at election time, and then this is done mostly in collective terms (e.g., “Awazzim voters are in majority in Salmiyya”). Because this policy so clearly prevails in Kuwait, and because everyone seems to toe the line as far as official discourse is concerned (private discourse is another matter), it is difficult to claim that the state wholeheartedly encourages the emergence of particularistic tribal thinking.¹⁷ How the state really views tribes and tribalism, therefore, is the object of endless speculations and not so few disagreements. Some (mostly hadhar) accuse the state of doing its best to “tribalize” or “bedouinize” the whole society; others (mostly badu from “noble” tribes) believe the state is systematically trying to do away with tribal identity and tribal culture. Before embarking on this discussion, let us look at another naming instance of a rather different character.

MODERN ETHNOPOLITICS: THE NAMING GAME

At the top of hadhar society are the Sunni merchant families, who founded Kuwait in the early 18th century. These hadhar families issue from the same North Arabian tribes to which the overwhelming majority of badu immigrants belong: Anaiza, Mutayr, Ajman, Utayba, Shammar, and so forth. They are thus living proof that the two categories are porous. Furthermore, the transition from badu to hadhar is not only possible, but it is also the critical event the result of which was the creation of Kuwait. In other words, transition from badu to hadhar is the key element in this country's history, the very condition for its existence. The Kuwaitis are fully aware of this, yet many hadhar are convinced that the new immigrants from Saudi Arabia are unable to follow the path of integration that their forefathers traveled so successfully. In this section, I look into the transition process itself and ask what signaled it in the old days and is the same mechanism still in operation today?

When queried about this subject, my informants, both hadhar and badu, answered that no particular events or rituals marked the passage from badu to hadhar. Whenever I suggested change of names as a possibility, people were surprised and on the whole, skeptical. Yet, name change has also caught the attention of other authors.¹⁸

I was told that before the 1960s and 1970s, a badu was known by a three-digit name: his own, his father's, and his surname, which was customarily the name of his lineage (fakhth). This is now changed and a badu is known by his own name, his father's name, and his surname, which in most cases is the name of his tribe.¹⁹ This novel practice has produced a whole population with family names such as al-Mutayri, al-Ajmi, al-Aneizi, al-Utaybi, al-Dhafiri, al-Shammari…. In Kuwait, as elsewhere in the region, names are used to identify people and place them on the ethnic, tribal, and sectarian maps. It seems that in the pre-oil era, in the process of settling down to sedentary life, it was common for bedouin to stop identifying themselves through their tribal connections and to become known by some new, more individualized names. The case of the al-Sabah ruling family is a good illustration: although originating from the great Anaiza tribe, they retained neither their tribal nor their lineage names but took as surname the name of an ancestor among the first who arrived in Kuwait. A person can also be referred to according to his occupation (e.g., al-Qallaf, the shipwright) or his origin (e.g., al-Hassawi, the one from al-Hassa). Sometimes the name was applied by extension to the kin group he leads. In some cases, a person is given a nickname on the basis of some typical physical feature and it simply remains stuck with him and his immediate family. This naming pattern among hadhar is clear enough to allow us to conclude that the practice of name change must have been general earlier, so much so that it was taken for granted. Name change upon sedentarization occurred not only among members of minor and “low” tribes but also among the Najdi families who all come from “noble” tribes, as the case of the al-Sabah indicates.²⁰ Yet, many of their hadhar compatriots, while aware of their Najdi origin, hardly remember these families' specific tribal affiliations; sometimes, the hadhar individual him/herself does not know it.²¹ Today, a few hadhar families may have kept their lineage names, but practically no hadhar is known by the name of his/her original tribe,²² in striking contrast to the naturalized badu.

How are we to interpret the symbolic meaning of name change under the process of sedentarization? Beside its practical motivations (e.g., hadhar names are indicative of people's new occupations), are we to view the change as a way for the kin group to make explicit their intention of giving up their previous way of life and status, a sort of public announcement that they have, or intended to, become hadhar? This does not seem to be the case; if it had been, one could expect the move to have a special significance in people's social awareness, even expect it to be treated as a kind of rite of passage. I have found no indications that lead me to this conclusion. In fact, I have had much difficulty finding out about this process, let alone the underlying reasons, from my informants. Most Kuwaitis, especially the hadhar, have an ambivalent attitude to the matter of names: names are of great importance to them yet their knowledge of the mechanisms that resulted in people being named as they are today is limited. Only a handful among my hadhar informants knew why, when, and under what circumstances their ancestors dropped their lineage or tribal names and adopted a new hadhar name. My inquiries on this subject often left them puzzled; some would admit that they had never thought about the matter, but my friends told me that I read too much into “this thing about names.” This I find curious, since most hadhar do a lot of reading themselves when they interpret the badus' use of their tribal names as a sign of their unwillingness to integrate into Kuwaiti, meaning hadhar, society. In other words, while the failure of the newcomers to give up their tribal names is perceived as an expression of their bad faith, the decision of the earlier bedouin to change their names is looked upon matter of factly, as an event without any particular significance. When my hadhar informants complain that this society is getting more and more tribal they would mention the renewal of the importance of tribal names as a telltale feature. Yet, the same persons did not grant any importance to the name change their forefathers undertook some decades or centuries ago. When I pressed them for details, they usually shrugged and said that “all this happened long ago.” Name change does not seem to be an event about which grownups tell their children; consequently, it does not seem to occupy any particular place in the collective memory of the kin group. Nor do people—both hadhar and badu—appear to have reflected much over the reason(s) why the badu immigrants of the past decades have changed to being called by their tribal rather than their lineage names.

There is no indication that earlier name change was compulsory; people were free to choose the names by which they wished to be identified in their hadhar existence. Today, this situation has changed. It has been suggested that the adoption of tribal names is a deliberate policy undertaken by the state to make people vote along tribal lines.²³

I have found no solid evidence that this is the case. However, there is little doubt that tribal surnames have a potent, hence mobilizing, effect in Kuwaiti society today and can be seen as a central feature in the rise of badu ethnopolitics. Tribal names have turned out to be convenient flags to rally groups for collective action in the groups' interests, most notably at election time but also on other occasions. The politics of names has drawn the badu's attention to the importance of identity in a radically new context and to the terms of reference underlying the politics of belonging. It also importantly contributes to heightening the perception of mutual distance and difference between hadhar and badu, and gives it a renewed urgency that goes well beyond the old pre-independence cultural dichotomy. As a result, both categories stand out in everyone's imagination as unified and homogeneous groups with their own specific culture and their own spatial and social “territories.” In the case of the badu, they have their “tribal” or bedouin culture and the outlying areas, where they live. Likewise, the public sector and the army, where the majority are employed, are looked upon by hadhar as territories and sectors that the badu have conquered and monopolized; just as the central areas and trade are seen by badu as hadhar territories. In imparting the boundaries between the two categories, a concreteness that practically defines hadhar and badu as ethnic groups and renders the transition from the latter to the former a lot more difficult than earlier, the politics of names is a testimony to the success of ethnopolitics in Kuwait today.

THE TRIBALIZATION OF THE NATION OR THE NATIONALIZATION OF TRIBES?

Are tribes overtaking the previously hadhar society of Kuwait? Or are tribes and tribal culture succumbing to the urbanization and nation-building processes? Do tribes impact on the Kuwaiti state or the other way round? To come to grips with these questions, let us look into a development frequently mentioned as indisputable evidence of the society being tribalized: the growing concern with asl among Kuwaitis.

Strictly speaking, asl means “origin”; but to Kuwaitis, whether badu or hadhar, the term has a particularly positive connotation. Only individuals with untainted origin know where they come from, mixed origins being by definition difficult or impossible to trace. Therefore, asl can be translated as purity of origin rather than simply origin. Until recently, the adjective asli used to be contrasted with baisari. Whereas asli is an Arabic word, baisari derives from Persian and is said to mean “without a head” or “without origin.” The implication was that all Persian Shi

a were of lowly descent compared with Arabs, especially those from “noble” tribes, which are at the apex of the traditional Arabian hierarchy. According to badu informants, “in the old days” no bedouin would think of marrying a hadhar, because the hadhar way of life was perceived as contaminated by the mix of cultural practices that characterizes town life. The contamination was at its worst when the hadhar married outside their kin groups, and to baisaris. Among the Northeastern tribes, the endogamy rule was still strictly observed in the 1970s

²⁴

and the definition of endogamy was marrying within the extended family or the lineage. Beyond the lineage, people spoke of “marrying outsiders” even though man and wife still belonged to the same tribe. However, change is taking place: more and more bedouin men marry not only outside their lineage but also outside their tribes, and more and more men marry hadhar women.²⁵

In most cases, however, the hadhar wife turns out to be from a settled branch of the husband's tribe. In extratribal marriages, there has been a long tradition of mutual marriage alliance between the two tribes involved, so that over the years and at a certain level, they can be said to merge into one single kinship unit.²⁶

Change, therefore, is not radical but change there is nevertheless, and in the eyes of some badu, it spells the beginning of the end of the asl ideology. However, this is a minority view. On the whole, Kuwaitis believe that concern with asl, far from decreasing, is also a rising phenomenon among hadhar. “Back in the 1970s,” a badu man told me, “it was good for a hadhar to come home from studies abroad with an American PhD in his pocket. If he had also a blond, blue-eyed American or European wife, it was even better. Nowadays, it's no longer like this. Even the hadhar are no longer keen on marrying foreign women. Kuwaiti women are definitely more sought after.” In his view, this is one of the positive effects of badu culture on the society: badu are reminding hadhar of the value of pure origin. Many in Kuwait now agree that “to marry Kuwaiti” is to “marry right.” They also differentiate between various kinds of Kuwaiti: group and sectarian endogamy prevails among Sunni, Shi

a, as well as among the old merchant upperclass. The main norm, however, is that Kuwaitis should not look for marriage partners from among the ca. 1.5 million non-Kuwaitis who live and work in the country. The badu's presence may have helped bring to the surface a deep-seated view that is commonly shared by all Kuwaitis. However, it would be more appropriate to trace the norm of “marrying Kuwaiti” to the fact that Kuwaitiness is a limited good in a society where the Kuwaitis are a privileged minority holding vast social power over a population of migrant workers with circumscribed rights. Rather than the old tribal value system, it is wealth and ethnic stratification that foster the politics of exclusion among modern-day Kuwaitis.

²⁷

There has undeniably been a renewed interest in purity of origin in Kuwait over the past decades, but this origin is now national rather than tribal, and the primary agents behind this development are not tribes nor badu but economic prosperity and the Kuwaiti state. To encourage Kuwaiti men to marry Kuwaiti women, the state grants the groom KD 4,000 (KD 2,000 as a gift and KD 2,000 as a loan) to help him pay the price of the bride—on condition the bride is a first wife and she is a Kuwaiti citizen.²⁸

To encourage Kuwaiti women to marry Kuwaiti men, the state resorts to the Nationality Law that stipulates that nationality is transmitted through the father. Children of a Kuwaiti mother and a non-Kuwaiti father are automatically denied Kuwaiti nationality. When implemented together, these two legal practices guarantee that most Kuwaitis will tend to follow the principle of national endogamy. Even without the badu's presence, concern with identity and purity of origin is bound to arise in an ethnocratic society, that is, a society ruled by an ethnic minority, like Kuwait.²⁹

The badu's presence gives actors as well as observers the misleading impression that we are witnessing a tribally inspired search for asl and the return to an older form of collective identification; whereas in fact we are witnessing a process of nation building by a state that has vast financial means at its disposal. To achieve its aims, the state makes use of at least two cultural values it knows will resonate well with the people: generosity (through the distribution of welfare goods and services among citizens) and exclusive origin. By maximizing these values, which are deeply rooted in tribal culture, the state is not cultivating tribalism, as is often claimed. It seeks not to (re)empower tribes but to make use of tribal symbolism to elicit loyalty and devotion to the nation-state and the state's leadership. In this sense, the ongoing process in Kuwait is a nationalization of tribe rather than a tribalization of the nation.

PROMOTING NATIONALISM THROUGH WELFARE

The Kuwaiti state is a strong state. Its strength resides less in its use of force than in its use of generosity when dealing with its citizenry. By this is meant that the state grants free housing, free healthcare, and free education to its citizens, and a host of other economic advantages, in addition to more general benefits such as heavily subsidized basic food items, water, electricity, and petrol.³⁰

The Kuwaiti welfare-state is in many ways a remarkable institution, and its role in nation building cannot be overemphasized. Most consequential is the indiscriminate distribution of health services, housing, and education among the citizens. The distribution of land and government-built houses does not take into consideration the recipients' background and thus is leading to a gradual lowering of social barriers in the newer residential areas (between the Fourth and the Sixth Rings). After several decades of free and universal education, higher education is now emerging as a valuable social asset. Moreover, it is beginning to compete with asl in people's choice of marriage partners: individuals and families are beginning to look more favorably upon a potential marriage candidate from humble social origin but with a prestigious university degree and a bright future. However, Kuwait as a whole is a culturally conservative society, particularly when it comes to family and gender matters; this is true for the badu as well as the hadhar populations.³¹ Conservatism is exacerbated by the ethnocratic nature of the society. Perceptions of social and cultural threats emanating from the vast foreign migrant population give rise to defensive legislations and practices and a tendency among Kuwaitis to appeal to tradition in their attempts to retain a sense of personal and collective identity. Marriage, the family/the kin group, and gender relations are critical areas for this identity politics. The state legislation and state practices in this regard meet the patriarchal requirements of tribal culture.

One might ask, why does the state bother to try to break down social barriers through an indiscriminate welfare policy if it ultimately aims at establishing a tribal society? The answer is obviously that the state does not seek to build a traditional tribal society but a traditional national society, where the nation, not the tribe, is the object of collective devotion. Today the state has taken over the task of tribes (to provide groups with a collective identity) and that of lineages (to provide individuals and families with security, law and order).

³²

As a result, tribes and their subdivisions have lost their pragmatic, although not their symbolic, raison d'être. To paraphrase Fredrik Barth,³³

they are empty vessels—albeit important symbolic ones—whose cultural content depends on the social context. While effectively undermining the structure of the tribe, among other things through the housing and education policies, the state is careful to cultivate the external diacritica of tribal identity (e.g., tribal names) and the emotions they elicit. At the same time, the badu are perfectly aware that the source of their material well-being nowadays is the state, not the tribe. Increasingly, their allegiance goes to the state, although the tribe conveniently provides the idiom and imagery through which to experience and express this allegiance. We are witnessing a shift in identification and loyalty from tribe to nation, deftly staged and managed by the state, which appeals to both universalistic and particularistic values to achieve its aim. While the polarizing rhetoric about cultural and historical incompatibility between hadhar and badu unfolds in everyday life discourse, ignorance about tribes and things tribal is rapidly growing, also among badu: Kuwaitis under forty years of age, regardless of their social background, have no or very limited knowledge of tribes, tribal history, and tribal organization. Meanwhile, the family (a

ila) is acquiring greater significance for most badu, a development that brings them closer to the hadhar condition. Although awareness of tribal belonging may still be vivid among the badu, it is an identity that derives its social significance only from within the national context. It is the nation-state, through its monopoly of the distribution of welfare goods and services, which steers the social reproduction of tribal imagination and tribal identity, not the other way around. Tribes and tribal discourse are still commonly used among badu to speak of the relations between self and society, but the overarching frame of reference is no longer the tribe but the Kuwaiti nation-state.

ANTI-IMMIGRATION FEELINGS: THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCE OF THE WELFARE-STATE

Earlier I quoted a hadhar informant who nostalgically recalled that “in the 1960s and 1970s, we were all Kuwaitis: no one cared about what tribe you belong to.” Whether this perception is a correct description of how things really were in those days or not is not important; what matters is that this perception is widely shared among hadhar. What led to the resurgence of the hadhar–badu dichotomy in Kuwaiti popular discourse in the 1980s and 1990s? Throughout my research I have been struck by the ease with which the discourse is accepted as “normal” by both Kuwaitis and outside observers. This finding, I suggest, is due to the familiarity of the form and the content of the discourse. Succinctly, familiarity of form can be explained by the centrality of the hadhar–badu dichotomy in Arabian sociology, popularized long ago by classic scholars such as Ibn Khaldun.³⁴

Familiarity of content on the other hand arises from the fact that the claims and counterclaims echo a discourse widespread elsewhere in the world these days, not least in Western Europe. Looking at the arguments used by the hadhar population and the reactions to them by the naturalized immigrants, one cannot fail to have a sense of déjà vu: the same confrontations, albeit articulated according to different categorizing schemes, are taking place in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Holland, and Scandinavia between the host populations and the immigrants. In both Kuwait and Western Europe, we hear the native populations accuse the newcomers of taking advantage of the welfare system, and of being undeserving users because they had not contributed to its building. They also demand that the immigrants give up their former customs and ways of life, usually perceived as “backward,” and submit to the local society's norms as a token of their goodwill and loyalty. In response, we hear the immigrants try to justify their presence and make claims to greater recognition and participation on the basis of the principle of universality of rights. Common for Kuwait (and the other Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC] countries) and Western Europe is an extensive and costly welfare system the benefits of which are restricted to the citizens. These benefits are, everywhere, a jealously guarded common good, and because citizenship gives access to it, immigration is bound to be a matter of critical concern. A widening of the nation, understood as community of citizens, through naturalization means—at least in people's imagination—a reduction or even the end of the welfare-state. Under these circumstances, the arrival of immigrants inevitably sets in motion processes of ethnicization, whereby differences between host population and newcomers are systematically emphasized, even invented when need be, at the expense of any similarities and commonalities between them. The more extensive the welfare benefits are, the more restricted access to national membership becomes. In both Kuwait and Western Europe, the contending parties are engaged in processes of inclusion of self and exclusion of other, involving the manipulation of identities, myths of origin, morality, and history.

Citizenship in Kuwait may not entail many political rights, but it certainly entails extensive social rights.³⁵

Much of the hadhar criticism of the badu focuses on the badu's alleged role in politics—they are said to sell their voting support to the highest bidder, in this case the government. In fact, until the 1995 reform of the election law, most naturalized immigrants did not have the suffrage, and they still cannot stand as candidates (only their sons, born after the father's naturalization, can vote and stand). Although it took between twenty and thirty years for the naturalized citizens to achieve the right to vote, access to free education, free healthcare, and housing was granted them right away. Therefore, it is not the badu's exercise of their political rights but their exercise of their social rights that worries many hadhar. Social rights are also at the heart of the problem in Western Europe: here, the presence of North Africans, Turks, Pakistanis, and others was not objected to as long as they were merely transient migrant workers without any extensive social entitlements. They became a problem in the 1970s when it was clear that they were going to remain in the host countries as citizens, or at least as denizens, with claims to social rights. In Kuwait, the national citizens routinely complain about the presence of the foreign migrant workers but not much effort is exerted to bring about their departure because at the end of the day the expatriates, who do not accede to free education and practically free housing, do not compete with the natives in any real sense. There is a clear structural similarity between the expatriates in the Gulf today and the migrant workers in Western Europe in the pre-1970s decades. In contrast, the concern in many hadhar circles with putting a stop to the growth of the badu population is a faithful reflection of the present preoccupation in Western Europe with closing the borders to further immigration.

The transition from badu to hadhar was easier in the past because it provided the hadhar community, especially the merchants, with a larger pool of cheap labor. In those days, no one worried much about whether the nomads' “mentality” or “culture” would prevent them from carrying out this transition successfully. Nowadays, when a “badu” becomes “hadhar,” he does not become a potential worker but an actual user of the extensive social goods offered by the state to its citizens. Suddenly, the badu's capacity to adapt to the hadhar way of life is called into question. With the rise of citizenship and the welfare-state, the stakes have changed dramatically, leading to the rise of nationalism.