Jackals and Jackasses: A Gulf Story

In recent months, the petty feuds between Gulf and Egyptian cultural circles have resurfaced yet again—fueled by the war with Iran, the relentless intelligence and media campaigns waged by every regional power with skin in the game, and the ever-eager intellectuals and writers on both sides, forever poised to defend national identity, sovereignty, the dignity of His Excellency the President, or the prestige of His Majesty the King.

Each side needles the other over whatever speck it sees in the other’s eye, while remaining oblivious to the plank running straight through its own. These feuding exchanges inflame tribal and nationalist resentments, making genuine dialogue between Egypt’s political and cultural elites and their Gulf counterparts impossible, even perpetually deferred, because each side would rather play the role of provocateur than confront the real questions. The mere act of raising those questions costs you your privileges, and might get you exiled, jailed, stripped of citizenship, or, in the worst cases, cut to pieces with a bone saw.

But here I want to try to leap over the petty-feud arena and engage with a piece published recently in the Omani newspaper Oman by Suleiman Al-Ma’mari, titled: “Cairo Writes, Beirut Prints, and the Gulf Gets ‘Khalijified’!”

Khalijification — a term that describes the condescending attitude some Arab intellectuals adopt toward their Gulf counterparts, rooted in tired old stereotypes. One oft-cited example came in 2015, when the Egyptian novelist Youssef Ziedan opened a literary evening at Muscat’s Cultural Club with the quip: “Don’t you have any goats here who can join us?”

Al-Ma’mari wrote the piece after covering a virtual seminar held in Doha last April under the title “Transformations of Epistemological Consciousness: From Classical Orientalism to Contemporary Khalijification,” moderated by Yemeni researcher Faozi Al-Goidi, with participation from Omani novelist and researcher Mohammed Al-Yahyai, Saudi researcher Maysa Al-Khawaja, Kuwaiti writer and journalist Ibrahim Al-Malifi, and Iraqi media figure Salam Mosafir, based in Moscow.

From slavery to kafala

Al-Ma’mari relays the panelists’ views alongside analyses from other Gulf cultural figures, all of whom explain criticism of Gulf policies as the product of resentment; jealousy of countries that achieved rapid development through oil wealth, or by hosting American military bases.

Al-Ma’mari, writing from his position in Oman — a sultanate that occasionally takes stances at odds with the broader Gulf consensus — writes: “Many voices in the Arab world, and even within the Gulf itself, are calling on Gulf states to end the presence of foreign military bases. I don’t believe any free intellectual, Gulf or Arab, could object to that.”

He then closes his piece with a warning: “The danger of ‘Khalijification’ lies not only in the harm it does to the Gulf’s image, but in the way it may push Gulf people themselves to define their identity through reaction. It is not enough to expose the condescending gaze: we must build a Gulf self-knowledge that is more confident, expansive, and just; one that doesn’t respond to stereotyping with counter-stereotyping, or replace one old center with a new one.”

I want to make something clear to Mr. Suleiman: what we’re talking about is not condescension. It’s contempt. The same contempt any decent person or intellectual might feel toward any tribal culture that takes pride in a history built on enslavement, that continues to operate the kafala system, that rejects universal human values like equality and freedom for all people, and that uses “cultural specificity” to justify stripping teachers and laborers — the very people who built Gulf cities — of their most basic rights.

About that resentment

As for the Gulf’s economic leap: it was built, first of all, on the backs of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans brought to dive for pearls and work date-palm plantations from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1960s, when slavery was formally abolished in most Gulf states and replaced with the kafala sponsorship system.

Since then, millions of Arab and Asian workers have given their lives and the educations their home countries provided them, for free, to build those Gulf cities. They are still giving. And yet they have never become citizens, as would be the norm in any modern state. Their labor is extracted and their lives are consumed, literally and figuratively, forced into authoritarian employment arrangements with no right to form unions or professional associations, never treated as equals to their Gulf colleagues.

An Arab journalist or an Asian laborer does the same job as a Gulf national sitting next to them, yet it is simply impossible for them to earn the same salary or enjoy the same rights and benefits. At any moment they can be deported, their money and property seized, as has happened, and is happening now, with Pakistani workers expelled from the UAE, or even with citizens who’ve had their nationality revoked and their bank accounts frozen, as has happened and continues to happen in Kuwait.

This is not a matter of grudges. It is anger at inequality, and at Gulf intellectuals’ insistence on ignoring that inequality, hiding behind “cultural specificity,” when neither Islam nor Arab identity offers any justification for discrimination between people, or for the normalization of racism based on blood and tribe.

What some Gulf intellectuals want is not cultural exchange but a kind of aesthetic complicity

Al-Ma’mari also criticized Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr’s irritation at more and more Egyptian streets being named after Gulf figures. But the reality is that entire cities and streets in Egypt already bear the names of Gulf rulers, from Sheikh Zayed City to Faisal Street, precisely because Gulf rulers will only accept tributes to symbols from within their own ruling families.

So would Al-Ma’mari be pleased if Egypt named streets after Gulf intellectuals instead? What if the governorate of Damietta decided to name one of its squares after the Dhofar Revolution; one of the great liberation movements of the Arab world? Would Oman take that as a tribute or a provocation? And if one edition of the Cairo International Book Fair were named after the dean of Gulf literature: Saudi novelist Abdelrahman Munif, who lived and died in exile in Damascus and was buried there; would that be seen as mutual respect?

What some Gulf intellectuals want is not cultural exchange. It's a particular kind of aesthetic complicity: literature that makes its peace with power, that drowns itself in history and folklore, that puts off any questions of freedom and justice indefinitely. Recognition, when it comes, should go to those who deserve it — to those who defended the right of peoples to expression, imagination, and freedom — not to the minister or the prince who plagiarizes poems and signs his name to them.

A culture and its ghosts

When Al-Ma’mari and his fellow members of Gulf tribes, those who enjoy the privileges of citizenship, speak of “Gulf culture” or “Gulf literature,” what exactly do they mean?

In her essay “On the Ruins of National Literature, or: Literature Written by Outsiders,” Mona Kareem dismantles the idea of national literature in the Gulf, exposing the artificial and exclusionary nature of the term. What gets called “Gulf literature” includes only those who meet the requirements of legal and tribal belonging, while voices that live at the very heart of the place are excluded from it: the Bedoon, migrants, laborers, and writers who write in other languages.

The military and political challenges facing Gulf states demand a new imagination

These people, despite their central role in shaping daily life, are pushed to the margins, treated as transients in a space they themselves made. And it is the power backed by American bases and their political umbrella that decides what counts as “Gulf” and what counts as “foreign” — so that the foreigner is not the one who arrived from outside, but the one forced to remain a foreigner in the very place where they live.

We are talking about families three generations deep: born, educated, employed, and built into the Gulf, who are still denied basic rights, still barred from participating in defining the culture they belong to. So perhaps before we discuss “Khalijification,” we should think about Gulf culture outside its official image: outside the white thobes for men and black abayas for women, outside the rituals designed as performances of national pride.

Reimagining the Gulf cannot happen without acknowledging that what we call the center is nothing more than a political choice, and that the real Gulf culture is far wider than that center. Some educated, clear-eyed voices within Gulf countries understand this, and have begun calling publicly for radical changes to residency and naturalization systems. Most recently, Sultan Al-Qasimi published a piece calling for residents to be drafted into the national military, with promises of faster and more accessible paths to citizenship.

The military and political challenges facing Gulf states demand a new imagination: one that breaks with the idea of the “pure citizen” and the fantasy of ethnic purity. In the recent war, we saw men die in the Kuwaiti army who were Bedoon. In the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, we saw migrant workers fall as martyrs and casualties while defending those countries and their people; giving their lives so that life could continue in the cities they built.

If a resident is prepared to die defending this place, how can he be prevented from living in it as a citizen? If he is asked to carry a weapon, how can he be denied the right to carry the name?

I agree entirely with Al-Ma’mari’s call to resist and reject “Khalijification.” The Gulf is not the image it sells the world. It is not the malls and the soaring glass towers; it is the people who built those towers and live in their shadow. It is the worker who died and whose name was never recorded. It is the Asian poet who wrote in a language nobody here reads. It is the person who was denied citizenship but was never denied imagination.

And if there is one path to the Gulf’s survival, it is this: to finally acknowledge those who made it. Not as guests. Not as hands for hire. But as people with rights, and a place to call their own.