Setting the Scene – From Europe to the Persian Gulf

It was early spring 1924 when Swiss petro-geologist Arnold Heim (1882–1965) departed Zurich by train for the Persian Gulf with the purpose of investigating at first-hand oil deposits in the region. Earlier that year, the Eastern and General Syndicate Limited, a London-based company, had contacted Heim requesting that he carry out a ‘geological examination and exploration’ in Eastern Arabia of various concessions the company held or hoped to obtain, including the Hasa Concession, the Neutral Zone Concession, the Koweit Concession and the Bahrain Concession, ‘in respect of their mineral and especially oil possibilities’. For a period of five months (until August 1924), Heim's task was to assess the availability of exploitable resources in the region, especially but not exclusively petroleum. According to early twentieth-century methods of preliminary geographical surveying, Heim did so by immersing himself into the landscape of Eastern Arabia, effectively sensing crude in the wild. In the 1920s, petroleum had not yet been found in substantial quantities in the region. It was still unknown if such fossil deposits even existed. Also, the extent to which the black gold would mould life into a global petro-culture was probably far from imaginable.

From today's perspective, neither the worldwide importance of the discovery of petroleum in the Gulf in the first half of the twentieth century nor the effects of oil industrialisation and petro-modernity on local communities can be overestimated. Yet, the naturalization of fossil energy usage in the region and the world at large has mainly worked to abstract petroleum-the-raw-material in the process. Today, oil gives way to a complex regime of (in) visibility because it is somehow everywhere and in everything, but its synthetisation redirects our experience and knowledge of petroleum via other materials, forms of energy, infrastructure and images. Our encounter with crude oil is negotiated through the car's speed, the view from an airplane, a trainer's plastic material, or oily skin care. Sensing petroleum-the-raw-material, as smell, fire or sticky substance, in contrast, has become emblematic of calamities such as the Gulf War in 1990/1 and Deepwater Horizon. But what about the traces of crude in its natural habitat prior to the pipeline–refinery complex? Pre-industrial sighting and sensing of crude oil in the Arabian Peninsula desert have so far not received much scholarly attention.

On 22 March 1951, on the first day of the Persian calendar year, and just two days after the Iranian parliament had passed the oil nationalisation bill, employees of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) began a strike in the port of Bandar Mahshahr in South West Iran. Over the next few days and weeks, thousands more joined in the strike across the company's areas of operations in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, especially in the refinery town of Abadan. Lasting until 27 April, the strike succeeded in halting the flow of oil in the Abadan refinery – the largest refinery in the world at the time – and signalled AIOC's imminent expulsion at the hands of popular resource nationalism.

Yet participation in the strike was not confined only to full-time employees of the oil company. In the words of the onlooking US embassy, the ‘outstanding characteristic’ of the strike was that it was ‘created, and long sustained, by fewer than 400 students’. These were students at AIOC's training centres in Abadan, especially the Abadan Technical Institute. The company had built such centres to produce skilled, loyal employees, yet these trainees used such spaces to mobilise against the company, performing sit-ins and holding secret meetings there to co-ordinate with workers in the refinery. Such was the fear among military officials about the Abadan Technical Institute and student hostel being ‘hubs of the strike’ that the military eventually blockaded both to prevent further intrigue. Not deterred, students continued to be at the forefront of resistance against the police during the strike, consequently suffering bloodshed and fatalities. It is surprising, therefore, that their main demand should seem so trivial: that pass marks in exams were unfairly high.

This episode offers a window on understanding the purpose and impact of training in the history and politics of the global oil industry. AIOC envisaged training as not only producing productive, docile employees, but also as helping it to meet its political obligations to the Iranian government in ‘Iranianisation’, increasing the number of Iranians in senior staff positions. Thus, exploring AIOC's training schemes in the preceding years better illuminates how an oil company negotiated local entanglement in the desire to ultimately remain disentangled and removed from national or local politics. Scholars have already shown how oil companies have strived towards such aims through strategies of racial segregation, welfare paternalism and urban planning.

Giambattista Vico1

As an inscription device, the energy graph reflects a style of hydrocarbon aesthetics that celebrates abstractness. The graph is an abstract image that does not make a great deal of sense on the surface of things. In fact, as I argue below, abstractness in graphical representation is analogous to the contemporary art image – the latter, a visual representation whose recognition reflects the consecration of an effort. Pierre Bourdieu notes that contemporary art invites appreciation through an imposition of refinement of taste – what he calls the Kantian aesthetic. As a form of taste, the Kantian aesthetic functions to endow populations with a feeling for the world that favours distance. Peter Sloterdijk employs a similar aesthetic regime, which he labels cynical reason. Both the Kantian aesthetic and cynical reason tend towards a rejection of the obvious in favour of abstractness. By applying these discourses in this instance, in this chapter I draw attention to the way in which graphical representation in energy development (and in climate change) favours distanced reflection as a form of aesthetic appreciation.

In The Pulse of Modernism, the historian Robert Brain notes that the origin of the modern graph lies in graphical inscription instruments invented in the nineteenth century which opened new ways of moving from materiality to semiotics and established a desire for linear temporality. For example, in their attempts to modify the work of steam engines, engineers such as James Watt introduced graphical copying processes for mechanically tracing the movement of the piston inside the cylinder of an engine. Brain notes that such instruments, which began crudely by affixing a pencil to a piston rod and then to a registering apparatus made up in part of writing paper, transformed the piston's mechanical movement into graphical expression.

Rivers of plastic waste float down streams and alleys in Beirut; an art gallery in Dubai showcases a pile of plastic sandals; geologists in Arabia and Turkey take photographs and rock samples; asphalt roads in the United Arab Emirates cross and frame regional and national borders; family-oriented compounds and labour camps house engineers and rig operators; and refinery fires in Kuwait light the sky with toxins. These are just a few of the ways in which petroleum and petroleum by-products appear in and shape everyday life in the Middle East. Some of these manifestations are recognised as involving petroleum, others less so; some involve specialised knowledge, others are more public. There is so much more; petroleum and petroleum by-products permeate life.

This volume explores how oil has shaped and mediated everyday life in the modern and contemporary Middle East. We aim to highlight the diversity of this experience as a corrective to what we see as the ‘downstream effect’ that we believe has dominated readings and public perceptions of the Middle East's petroleum resources. This ‘downstream effect’, coloured by the inter-ruptions of Middle East oil supplies to European and American consumers, the pernicious effects of petro-dollars flooding financial markets and the global reverberation of the regional geopolitics of oil conflict, has shaped attention on Middle East oil almost exclusively as a site of geopolitics and production. Indeed, we aim to highlight how a range of experiences of oil in the Middle East are shaped by the simultaneity of upstream and downstream processes and dynamics and are embedded in multiple political-economic scales, from the local to the global.

In the chapters that follow, oil is approached as a natural resource explored by geologists, engineers and biologists; as an extractive industry that has triggered contestation over labour and borders as well as environmental degradation; as a commodity forging new national subjectivities and spatial imaginaries, including those shaped by enhanced mobilities and automobility; as potential wealth that structures financial projections, anticipation, anxieties and disappointments; and as a substance and source of energy framed by images in advertising, corporate literature, graphs and aerial photographs, as well as film, art, architecture and design.

Sargon Joseph Hallaby, an Iraqi Christian born in the oil city of Kirkuk in 1934, joined the Basra Petroleum Company (BPC) in the early 1950s as a communication apprentice and was sent to Lebanon and England as a company trainee. In 1971 he left Iraq and migrated to Australia where he started working as a telecommunications technician for the Sydney Postal Services. Interviewed in the early 1990s by the Migration Heritage Centre of New South Wales for a project that collected memories of homeland among immigrants, Sargon chose to be photographed holding a copy of The Basra Auto Radio System – one of BPC's publications – with a photo of himself as a young apprentice in one of the company's audio equipment rooms (Figure 4.1). He recalled: ‘One day in 1954, a photographer came to the company and photographed us for the book. In England, in 1967 one of the engineers said to me “You know there is a journal about your company?” and he arranged to give me a copy. It is a very good memory of those days in Iraq.’

The copy of the Basra Audio System and Sargon's photo as a young man taken by an unknown BPC photographer are part of a large corpus of public relations materials produced by foreign oil companies in the Arab world since the early 1950s: photographs of employees, public projects, oil infrastructure and modern townships; magazines, technical reports, brochures and posters; and videos and films used to train, educate and entertain the workforce. Much of this public relations archive is elusive. It is ‘slippery’ like the crude hidden underground, but also piecemeal, reflecting the painful incompleteness of and lack of access to many archives on and in the Middle East, an area where document absence and displacement are often the work of authoritarian regimes, political upheaval and, in some cases, simple carelessness. Oil company materials related to the period before the nationalisation of the industry are often scattered across several libraries and private collections in the West and Middle East, not having been made available to the public in bulk by the British and American consortia that controlled the petroleum industry.

American engineer Larry Barnes was working on a Wednesday at Abqaiq, one of the main Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) installations in Saudi Arabia, when he heard about ‘some kind of trouble’ taking place seventy kilometres away in Dhahran. Barnes listened on the phone as an Aramco secretary ‘shriek[ed], “They are burning Dhahran! They are setting cars and houses on fire!”’ She was referring to Aramco's Arab employees, many of whom were protesting US support for Israel. This was no ordinary Wednesday, but 7 June 1967, the third day of what some would later call the ‘Six Day War’ and a day that came to be known as ‘Rock Wednesday’ among the thousands of Aramco employees and their families who lived in the Saudi Eastern Province. According to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), ‘Aramco was hit by a mob which broke in the gates, looting and overturning cars’, forcing the company to shut down its refinery and loading facilities. Demonstrators then surrounded the US consulate before advancing on the family quarters serving the US Military Training Mission at the Dhahran Airbase. ‘Despite the fact that women and children were inside’, the CIA reported, ‘homes were entered and almost everything inside destroyed.’

Barnes immediately became concerned about his own family. Like other Americans, Barnes, his wife Marion and their three children resided in Dhahran's suburban Senior Staff Community, once an all-white company town that Aramco was slowly integrating as it promoted Saudi Arabs in response to government demands and previous strikes. According to his written account, Barnes thought in that moment of a Belgian friend's terrifying experience in the Congo, which had witnessed its own ‘native uprising’. Ominously, this Belgian claimed that relations between locals and westerners there had seemed at least as friendly as they were in Saudi Arabia. Barnes telephoned Marion, who was ‘semi-hysterical’. He could ‘hear glass shattering as rocks came through the windows’. Barnes ordered his wife to load his .38 revolver and lock herself in the bedroom closet with their three-year-old daughter. Meanwhile, Barnes had his American foreman gas up a new ‘V8 Chevy sedan’. Barnes put his ‘foot flat down on the gas pedal’ and raced at top speed to Dhahran.

Absent and Present, Visible and Invisible

Intangible, ubiquitous and elusive at the same time, oil in Turkey is a substance infused with much confusion, speculation and imagination. Due to Turkey's particular geological history and setting, oil is concentrated in very small oil traps. Today, Turkey's limited domestic oil production covers only 7 per cent of its demand. All of this domestic oil, however, is extracted in Turkey's Kurdish-populated south-east, a region characterised in the past century by armed conflict, emergency rule and military occupation. Many do not understand why Turkey has so little oil when its close Middle Eastern neighbours have so much. Some have no idea that oil is being extracted in the south-eastern parts of the country. And yet others think that there is so much more oil than is being revealed, and that sinister powers are obstructing oil's extraction. In the midst of so much speculation, petroleum geologists – and anthropologists of oil – in Turkey are met with puzzled reactions and curious questions that often lead to further speculation and uncertainty.

Faruk, an exploration geologist employed at the state-owned oil company Turkish Petroleum, for instance, often complained about the questions he always got. ‘When I tell people what my job is, I often get this reaction: “What, oil? Is there oil in Turkey? I had no idea!”’ That many people who were not part of the energy industry were not aware of the existence of any domestic production in Turkey was for Faruk an unavoidable consequence of a variety of geological factors that have determined the specific characteristics of oil in Turkey. Yet for a considerable number of people, there are political, not geological forces behind Turkey's low domestic production. For them, the question is not one of geological setting and, thus, of the real absence of large oil reserves. The issue, for them, is that Turkey has, in fact, abundant oil deposits under the ground, but that this fact is hidden by the government, foreign powers or secret international treaties.

Oil has been a key material in the reproduction and mediation of social and political life in the twentieth century.

Roughly a third of the twenty-one experts in petroleum microbiology who gathered at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) on 15–17 January 1979 were based in the Middle East. The remainder hailed from Western Europe, the USA and Japan, mostly from the research departments of some of the world's biggest oil and petrochemical companies, among them British Petroleum, Imperial Chemical Industries, Phillips Petroleum and the Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company. The Proceedings of the OAPEC Symposium on Petroprotein, published the following year, suggest a distinctly torch-passing tone to the conference. By 1979, the big international companies were almost all abandoning the petroprotein business, having judged their attempts to synthesise food supplements by fermenting yeast or bacteria on hydrocarbon feedstocks to have been scientifically and technically successful but impossible to make profitable. Emil Malick, President and CEO of Provesta Foods (a division of the US-based Phillips Petroleum), captured the state of this field succinctly in his presenta-tion. Provesta's microbial protein supplement would not, his company had concluded, be able to compete with prices for soya or fishmeal as a protein source for the foreseeable future. But, he continued, reiterating a claim he had made in 1976 to the League of Arab States: ‘nations in the Middle East and elsewhere that possess large oil and gas reserves … appear to be in the best strategic and economic position to make and sell [petroprotein] in world trade.’

KISR's 1979 symposium thus contemplated the possibility that a combination of resources unique to the Middle East – abundant hydrocarbons and as-yet-undiscovered microbes – might yet realise the gathered scientists’ dream of bringing to market a new, cheap, safe and efficient way to feed livestock and maybe, one day, humans. Scientists in the Biotechnology Department of the Food Resources Division at KISR had taken up this challenge in 1977, as one of a number of initiatives begun during a significant expansion of KISR led by General Director Dr Adnan Shihab-Eldin. Their work continued, without interruption and with significant success in meeting its targets, until 1990.

In the end, neither livestock nor humans in the Middle East ended up on a home-grown petroprotein diet.

On 17 January 1991, US-led coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. By mid-February, as a ground offensive became imminent, the Iraqi regime put into effect its ‘Plan for Deferred Destruction’ (khittat al-takhrib al-muʾajal ), which entailed detonating Kuwait's oil wells. When the war ended on 26 February, 735 of around 870 active wells were ablaze and burned 5 million barrels of oil per day for the next nine months. It was initially estimated that it could take five to ten years to extinguish the fires, which, if left alone, could burn for over a hundred years. The first team of American oil firefighters sent by the Kuwaiti government immediately after the liberation to assess the damage got the first glimpse of the enormous task that lay ahead. As Joe Bowden, Sr, founder of Wild Well Control, put it:

One of Bowden's firefighters, George Hill, thought that Joe had ‘lost his mind … his ability to converse – you know, his vocabulary’.

The incomprehensibility and indescribability of Kuwait's burning oil fields reflects the ‘intellectual vertigo’ that characterises the global oil and gas sector. Despite the ubiquity of oil in our everyday lives, ‘the inner workings’ and ‘infrastructural guts’ of the industry remain largely invisible to the vast majority of the world's population, and the full ‘scale and reach’ of the world oil sector is therefore ‘impossible to fully grasp’. Like the oil industry itself, the crisis of the oil fires at first glance appeared impossible to comprehend in its totality. Neither the world nor the industry had ever seen a man-made crisis of this magnitude. But while the dizzying scale of the catastrophic destruction seemed incomprehensible, like other oil-related crises the fires paradoxically made oil itself more visible and tangible than ever before. Kuwait's oil infrastructure lay outside the physical boundaries of the city's metropolitan zone in heavily restricted areas.

This chapter examines the impact of oil on the twin processes of state formation and space-making in the Trucial States and United Arab Emirates and Sultanate of Oman in the mid-twentieth century. In much of the literature on the history of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, these processes are linked through oil concessions. Concessions necessitated the demarcation of domestic and international boundaries in the Arabian Peninsula, a key part of the state formation process. This chapter looks instead at state formation through a new means of oil-fuelled mobility – automobility. Beginning in the early 1950s and surging dramatically at the end of the 1960s, the automobile rapidly displaced older modes of transportation, in the process becoming synonymous with modernisation and state-building. The automobile's speed and power sparked violence, necessitated new modes of regulation as well as a new road network, and made the state visible and tangible in even the most remote areas of the region. New boundaries between states were demarcated, with different rules for travel by car and by foot or animal. In the process, new understandings of space emerged, and state control over territory dramati-cally intensified. Eventually, it became both physically possible and morally permissible for UAE and Omani citizens (and others) to travel to places that had not been open to them before, while other patterns of circulation were closed off by a new international border; automobility and roads created both new freedoms and new restrictions. Through the lens of automobility, oil's role in state formation becomes more complex and contested, as various actors ranging from British Political Agents to local sheikhs wrestled with how new forms of movement ought to be governed.

Two spatial imaginaries frame the chapter's analysis – the pre-oil dirah, rooted in seasonal migrations and kinship relations, and the nascent dawla (state), which required free movement within demarcated boundaries. The shift from the dirah to the dawla is traced through several episodes involving automobile travel. The potential of automobility to undermine the existing political and spatial order is seen in the 1938 Majlis Movement in Dubai and in a 1950 conflict in Shaʾam, in northern Ras al-Khaimah.

The Searchers

Al-Bahithun (The (Re)searchers) is an art project that highlights the link between nationalised knowledge and oil wealth. The nationalisation of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972 allowed the Iraqi state to utilise unprecedented revenues from the sale of oil. My work explores how this wealth was dependent on, and tied to, the empowerment of local expertise and how a good portion of oil revenues went into training and educational programmes as well as supporting the welfare of scientists, researchers and university graduates. My project's name is borrowed from an Iraqi film made in 1978 entitled Al-Bahithun (The Searchers).

I play on the double meaning of the Arabic term al-bahithun: ‘the searchers’, and ‘the researchers’. While the al-bahithun featured in the film are primarily oil explorers, assembled to search for oil in the marshes of Southern Iraq (al-Ahwar), in my work I explore what has been made possible by the revenue generated by these (oil) discoveries: the development of a national research culture that helped secure the autonomy of oil as an Iraqi national industry as well as the structures of power and politics underlying it. This chapter describes how the objects I featured in my art project Al-Bahithun reproduce the condition of (re)searchers who oscillated between the projects of nationalisation, knowledge, art, architecture and war as precipitated by oil. Finally, I aim to highlight how these oil movements are, as in the film, accompanied by attempts to hear the sounds that call(ed) the (re)searchers to the oil fields.

The core team featured in the film The Searchers represent a constituency of Iraqi society in the late 1970s – an engineer, a revenge-seeking peasant, a geologist and a treasure-seeking explorer. These men live and work on the water and conduct their explorations with a strange-looking tractor (Figures 5.1 and 5.2), a floating workstation equipped with telecommunication devices. When a phone call alerts the team that they are floating on a sea of oil, they explode with joy, except two of the men, who split from the group to embark on a secret search for a legendary land, a ‘lost paradise’.

In this chapter I investigate the post-Qajar era and demonstrate that, after the establishment of the Pahlavi state in the 1920s, the process of spatial abstraction reached new heights. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the Pahlavi state, particularly in the main cities of the country, undertook a massive project of social reform with widespread spatial ramifications. In Tehran, the municipality became the central state’s executive organ. The spatial strategies of the municipality resulted in the further decline of the communal sphere and the consolidation of the state’s domination over people’s daily lives and spaces. The codification of space was the state’s main method for accomplishing social reforms, modernization, and Westernization. By designing and imposing detailed guidelines for various communal spaces of the old city, the state disturbed the old, established forms of communal life. Similar to Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago, the Pahlavi state succeeded in imposing strict social control and discipline over urban populations through spatial guidelines. The state’s spatial codes, similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, stretched the state’s omnipresent control to every corner of the communal sphere. The Pahlavi state transformed the lived spaces of the old city into representations of space and means of social control.

Regarding this Lefebvrian framework, the political struggles of the 1940s and the early 1950s in Tehran pose significant questions that this chapter seeks to examine. After decades of spatial abstraction and the (re)production and development of the city through abstract spaces, how did the people of Tehran transform state spaces into a political arena to contest the hegemony of the state? What was the relationship between spaces of daily life produced in the Reza Shah era and the new spaces of protest in Tehran? Why did people choose the new streets and squares of the city for protesting against the monarchy? Why did they not take bast in the mosques of the old city as they did in the constitutional era? To analyze this spatial shift, this chapter scrutinizes political groups and forces of this era and their political gatherings, protests, demonstrations, and parades in public spaces of Tehran. This examination suggests a dynamic political scene that cannot be dichotomized into the conventional binary opposition of people against the state, as was examined during the constitutional era.

This book is about an ontological shift in the conceptualization and representation of the spatiality of Tehran, the capital of Iran, as the outcome of the formation and establishment of a novel spatial discourse. Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, this novel discourse sidelined the indigenous knowledge of Iranian urban society and the state and became the legitimate sources of imagining and producing the spatiality of Iranian cities. It transformed the spaces of the social, political, and economic processes in Tehran and elsewhere in the country. This shift was ontological and spatial, meaning that it brought about novel frameworks for urban society and the state to produce the spaces of their daily practices and strategies. This shift was discursive, leading to the abandonment of the traditional and indigenous spatial understanding in a long process of knowledge production; society and the state internalized a novel form of knowledge as the authentic source of producing the spatiality of social, economic, and political relations. This shift targeted both the state and society; it was top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. As the book suggests, since the mid-nineteenth century, this new spatial discourse has reproduced Tehran; the contours of the current city should be read through the analysis of this discursive transformation.

The 1870s expansion of Tehran was a vehicle for the spatial commodification of vast sections of the new city. Through this expansion, the Qajar court managed to produce the new spatiality as a lucrative commodity. The commodification of the city accompanied an unprecedented socio-spatial bureaucratization. A combination of several factors –from preventing outbreaks of diseases to organizing a novel relationship between the state and society – helped the state to stretch its control and dominance over the spatiality of the city. In its initial steps, these early attempts were the manifestations of a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state, society, and the city. To use Lefebvre’s concept of abstract spaces, Tehran went through a process of spatial abstraction particularly after its 1870s expansion. This chapter demonstrates how this expansion followed delicate economic objectives, and how the Qajar court had pursued this commodification process through its spatial policies long before the actual expansion of Tehran. Afterwards, the chapter focuses on the bureaucratization process and argues that, from the first half of the nineteenth century, the state had already generated spatial strategies to prevent cholera outbreaks in the city. The chapter moves to the examination of the spatial strategies of the state for the legitimation of its power and demonstrates how the expansion of Tehran helped the state to stretch its spatial control and domination beyond the confines of the royal compound. It continues with the study of the social life and spaces of the new neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century and finds that the Qajar elites produced semi-private spaces modeled after European social space. Finally, the chapter concludes with the investigation of the spatial strategies of the state and the impact of the two processes of commodification and bureaucratization on Tehran.