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The Many Voyages of Fateh Al-Khayr: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2020

Fahad Ahmad Bishara Open the ORCID record for Fahad Ahmad Bishara [Opens in a new window]
Fahad Ahmad Bishara*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22903-1738, USA.
*
Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

In this article, I make the claim that the time has come to re-situate the Gulf historically as part of the Indian Ocean world rather than the terrestrial Middle East. I explore the historical potential of thinking “transregionally” – of what it means to more fully weave the history of the Gulf into that of the Indian Ocean, and what the ramifications are for orienting it away from the terrestrially-grounded literature in which it has long been situated. The promise of an oceanic history, I argue, is both academic and political: first, it opens up the possibilities of new narratives for the Gulf’s past, suggesting new periodizations, fruitful avenues of historical inquiry, and new readings of old sources. But more than that, an oceanic history of the Gulf allows historians to push against the discourses of nativism that have pervaded the public sphere in the Gulf States.

Keywords

Fateh al-KhayrIndian OceanPersian Gulfoceanic history
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 397 - 412
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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5 I do not want to suggest here that the Gulf and Indian Ocean form two separate regions that one crosses in the act of writing transregional history. Rather, as I point out throughout the piece, the Indian Ocean constitutes a space in which we might connect the Gulf to other regions in world history; that is, the Gulf forms part of an Indian Ocean world, whether or not we consider the latter to be a distinct “region,” a term that comes with its own epistemological baggage. See, for example, Lewis, Martin W. and Wigen, Kären, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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29 For a useful survey of the Iranian literature on the Gulf, see Vatandoust, Gholam Reza, “The Historiography of the Persian Gulf: A Survey of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Persian Sources,” in Potter, Lawrence G., ed., The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 73–102Google Scholar.

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40 Min al-Sawahil, episode 11, 19 July 2013 (11 Ramadan 1343), Oman TV.

41 See, for instance, ‘Abd al-Muhsin al-Kharafi, ‘A'ilat al-‘Uthman: Madarasat al-Safar al-Shira‘i fi al-Kuwayt (self-pub., Kuwait, 2003); Muhammad, Khalid Salih, Jazirat Faylaka: Ashhar al-Juzur al-Kuwaytiyya (self-pub., Kuwait, 2006)Google Scholar; and al-Habib, Muhammad, al-Shi‘a fi Ma‘rakat al-Jahra’: Qira'a Watha'iqiyya Jadida (Kuwait: Dhat al-Salasil, 2014)Google Scholar.

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45 For examples of periodizations widely accepted by Indian Ocean historians, see Pearson, M. N., The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Alpers, Edward, The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press 2014)Google Scholar.

46 See, for instance, R. D. Bathurst, “The Yarubi Dynasty of Oman” (PhD diss., Oxford University, 1967); Mandaville, John, “The Ottoman Province of al-Hasa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 90, no. 3 (1970): 486–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Floor, Willem, The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs; The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral, 1747–1792 (Washington, DC: Mage, 2007)Google Scholar.

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50 Fuccaro, Histories, 140–45; Goswami, Call of the Sea, 191–230; Bishara, Sea of Debt, 50–55; Floor, Persian Gulf: Political and Economic History, 272–76, 334, 362.

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53 Ho, “Inter-Asian Concepts,” 919.

54 Hopper, Slaves of One Master; Mirzai, Behnaz A., A History of Slavery and Emancipation in Iran, 1800–1929 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017), 53–75Google Scholar.

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56 For an excellent discussion of these issues in Iran, see Beeta Baghoolizadeh, “Seeing Race and Erasing Slavery: Media and the Construction of Blackness in Iran, 1830–1960” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2018).

57 The Bin Jelmood House, opened in 2015, forms a part of a broader museum complex in Doha and is the first museum of its kind in the Arab world; the building was once the home of a prominent slave trader. “Bin Jelmood House,” Msheireb Museums, accessed 15 January 2020, https://www.msheirebmuseums.com/en/about/bin-jelmood-house. For a thoughtful reflection on the Bin Jelmood House, see Justin Stearns, “A Visit to the Bin Jelmood House in Doha,” ArteEast: The Global Platform for Middle East Arts (Winter 2017), http://arteeast.org/quarterly/a-visit-to-the-bin-jelmood-house-in-doha.

58 Bishara, “No Country but the Ocean.”

59 Lori, Noora, Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60 Historians of East Africa have been particularly attuned to these issues. See, for instance, Aiyar, “Anticolonial Homelands”; Glassman, War of Words; Brennan, James, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Prestholdt, Jeremy, “Politics of the Soil: Separatism, Autochthony, and Decolonization on the Kenyan Coast,” Journal of African History 55, no. 2 (2014): 249–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 See, for instance, Visser, Basra; Mustafa ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Najjar, ‘Arabistan Khilal Hukm al-Shaykh Khaz‘al, 1897–1925 (Beirut: al-Dar al-‘Arabiyya li-l-Mawsu‘at, 2009); and Takriti, Monsoon Revolution.

62 See also Willis, John M., “Azad's Mecca: On the Limits of Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 574–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Limbert, Mandana, “Caste, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Arabness in Southern Arabia,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 590–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 Here I am drawing inspiration from Prestholdt, “Politics of the Soil.” For excellent work on this in the context of the Gulf, see also Cooke, Miriam, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Samin, Nadav, Of Sand or Soil: Genealogy and Tribal Belonging in Saudi Arabia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

64 al-Dailami, Ahmed, “‘Purity and Confusion’: The Hawala between Persians and Arabs in the Contemporary Gulf” in Potter, Lawrence G., ed., The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 299–326Google Scholar. For examples of this, see, for instance, al-Ma‘azmi, Ahmad, al-Balush wa Biladuhum fi Dalil al-Khalij, 1515–1908 (Beirut: Mu'assasat al-Intishar al-‘Arabi, 2012)Google Scholar; and al-Habib, Muhammad, al-Baharina fi al-Kuwayt: al-Hijra wa-l-Istqiqrar, 1750–1950 (Kuwait: Khayr, 2019)Google Scholar. With the rise of the Internet, these counter-narratives have spread to online forums.

65 See Matthiesen, Toby, Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn't (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Here, I paraphrase from Dening, Greg, Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980), 128Google Scholar.

67 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)Google Scholar.