I did not travel to the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah because I had read Georg Simmel , a pioneer of the sociological imagination. But learning about nationhood through the everyday in Ras Al Khaimah made me read Georg Simmel. To understand why the encounter with everyday nationhood in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah drew me into classical sociology in such a way that I arrived at the writings of a long ago dead essayistic scholar from Berlin, and to understand how this encounter changed my understanding of modernity and the national, is what this book is all about. The argument goes roughly like this: When read through the textual universe of Georg Simmel , the modernity of nationhood is in the feeling of dualism between stabilizations and transgressions of the national as a social form of interaction .
Let me approach the argument by going back through three brief vignettes from the everyday, ranging from some of my first to some of my last impressions of being in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and particularly in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah . What these opening vignettes have in common is that they in different ways made me wonder about the unpredictable everyday between the how the national is established by the media and scholarship on the one hand, and, on the other hand, how these representations are destabilized in the ordinary. In 2012, the National Day parade in Dubai began not with the anthem but with a roar. It came from approximately 20â30 motorbike riders who, dressed in black on their Harley Davidsons, spearheaded the National Day parade at the foot of Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world. With the motto âWe lead, you follow, or get the hell out of our way,â the motorbike riders are known as the âBlack Eagles ,â a local version of the Hells Angels in America, but without the criminal element. Then came platforms on wheels with symbols of heritage. Bagpipe-playing Emiratis followed, along with sports cars from the Dubai Police. On the pavement, some Western tourists, expatriates, and migrant workers were dressed in Emirati national colors, shouting: âUAE, UAE, UAE.â
The National Day parade suggested a porous relationship between globalization and nationhood. What did it mean that both migrants and expatriates participated so eagerly in what is seen as the summarizing event of Emirati nationhood? Little more than a year later, I participated together with a local journalist in camel racing on the outskirts of Ras Al Khaimah , a beautiful and charming but relatively peripheral Emirate in the north of the UAE. For centuries before the UAE was federated into a nation-state in 1971, the camel functioned in particular among nomadic Bedouins as a multipurpose animal for trade, transportation, warfare, and nutrition, as well as (or perhaps because of this) as a significant cultural reference, not least in tribal poetry (Khalaf 2000). Camels, then, were often integral to celebrations in connection with visits by sheikhs, weddings, circumcisions, rain, and religious holidays. With the influx of oil wealth from the 1960s onward, however, the symbolic and practical significance of camels and camel racing gave way to modern infrastructure and, not least, a more comfortable alternative: cars. But then, camels resurfaced as cultural symbols from the 1990s onward to preserve Emirati local heritage. Prestigious mass events such as camel racing, camel beauty contests, and camel auctions, sometimes attended and financed by the highest strata of Emirati citizenry, have been reinvented as collective symbols of Emirati national culture.
The camel racing that morning in Ras Al Khaimah , however, had no audience, a matter mostly for those who participated. Minutes before the camels started running, we spontaneously entered a four-wheel drive together with two Emirati men, one of them the owner of a racing camel. The race began. Camel owners watched their camels while meandering in their cars among each other next to the racing camels for several kilometers: a chaotically automobile, myriad procession until the finishing line. The car radio was tuned into the loud voice from the constant commentator who watched over the race. Camel-racing jockeys were once young (and therefore light) children, primarily of Mauritanian origin, but in the wake of heavy critique from international human rights organizations, the children have been replaced as camel racers by German-produced, small robots (Abu-Zidan et al. 2012). From conversations with residents in Ras Al Khaimah , however, I learned that, even though it is strictly forbidden and clamped down upon, the robots have opened up a new avenue for cheating: It sometimes happens that owners make the robots electrocute camels while they race. Meanwhile, with no signs of electrocution, our driver encouraged the running by shouting âhut, hut, hutâ through a walkie-talkie to the small robot on top of the camel. At times, he made the small robot whip the camel by pushing a button on the side of the walkie-talkie. Our driver was concerned about the health of his camel. It had suffered, he told us, from high blood pressure lately: heart problems.
Is camel racing a matter of nationalism when it is not displayed as such, I asked myself as we raced alongside the running camels. What is the national and what is leisure? The ruins of Al Jazeera Al Hamra is haunted by ghosts, said two of my young informants some months later, as we meandered through the dusty rubble in the darkening daylight. It was the end of my fieldwork and the beginning of evening in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah . Al Jazeera Al Hamra was once inhabited by the Zaabi tribe. But from the 1960s to the 1970s, the tribe migrated from the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah to the Emirate of Abu Dhabi . The reasons are disputed. Some say the tribe migrated to prospects of better economic opportunities in Abu Dhabi , today one of the worldâs wealthiest territories per capita. Others say the Zaabi tribe voted with their feet. They migrated to Abu Dhabi because of a dispute with then local ruler Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad Al Qasimi.
The village is abandoned now. Anyone can drive there and walk around outside and inside the ruinous houses. Most of them, built from natural materials, share their appearance with the surrounding colors of dust. A few of them are built with wind towers, one of the most widespread and significant architectural heritage icons in the UAE. The function of contemporary wind towers is symbolic, but when they were originally brought by Persian merchants to the Arab Gulf coast in the early twentieth century, they functioned as a pre-modern form of air-conditioning. Their purpose was to catch the wind, which they then circulated through an ingenious architectural construction down through the tower and into the living space. Most wind towers in the UAE are reconstructed. That is what makes the towers in Al Jazeera Al Hamra so interesting: They are neither reconstructed, nor are they displayed as âheritage.â They simply stand there, in everyday decay, with very few tourists visiting the place. Stepping inside the abandoned living space with scattered old artifacts, old shoes, pieces of cloth, and sometimes the word Allah (God) painted in black on the sand-colored wall, and then pausing for a moment under the wind tower breeze in one of those 1960s houses: this might be one of the most concrete testimonies to just how fast the UAE developed, in the phrasing of local bestseller, from ârags to richesâ (Al Fahim 1995).
Once a year the Zaabi tribe returns to Al Jazeera Al Hamra to celebrate the place from where they come. The old houses are lit on the outside with light chains and from the inside with red lights. Dancing unfolds on carpets with somewhere in-between 50 and 70 males. Children and adults on stage recite poetry in praise of local traditions and national heritage. Often, toward evening prayer at 8 p.m., men pray together in front of the old mosque, the minaret no more than approximately five meters tall.
What wind towers, camels, and National Day have in common is that they are seen as integral symbolic parts of the repertoire through which the UAE is constructed in the vernacular of nationhood. But what the vignettes also hint at is that what is seen as âEmiratiâ in public discourse is not always or not in the same way associated with the ânationalâ in everyday life. National Day is also for those who are not nationals. Symbols of nationalism are not necessarily displayed as such in ordinary life. It is not always clear if what is symbolically celebrated is the ânationalâ or rather the âlocalâ on a smaller scale. Any glance at news and scholarship in most parts of the world will of course underline that nationalism can be a deeply felt moral compass for navigating modern times. But the pragmatics of everyday life may also underline that the imperative mood of nationalism is surprisingly ignored or kept in the background, even by subjects who are known to be nationalist.
How do we make sense of contingent nationalism ? How can the fleeting images of everyday nationhood be connected to a deeper theoretical concern? These are the questions with which this book is concerned. It shows how an encounter with the everyday, in the study of nationalism , can make us revisit the classics of sociology as continuous analytical worldviews. Some will find this preposterously Eurocentric. They will find it awkward to connect a peripheral part of the UAE with a classic from the heritage of European sociology. To those who argue, in a more or less implicit reproduction of orientalist reasoning, that the UAE and the Arab Gulf more widely cannot be understood according to the same criteria as Europe, this book may be provocative. I do assume, to quote the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf (1977, p. 47), that âI live in a different world, but you live in the same.â I assume that the best explanation for why it has become so commonplace to insist on multiple modernities is that we are indeed all modern (cf. Jung 2017). In the context of the Arab Gulf, I am also inspired by Anh Nga Longvaâs (2006) influential anthropology on nationhood and Bedouin immigrants in Kuwait . In an inciting conclusion, she notes a feeling of âdĂ©jĂ vuâ when thinking about migration and the construction of a modern welfare state in the Arab Gulf and in Western Europe: It is âthe same confrontations, albeit articulated according to different categorizing schemes,â Longva (2006, p. 183) writes, that unfold between newcomers and native populations. In both...