excerpt of the TEACHING GUIDE for Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula
Introducing the Key Concepts and Framing the Debate
Bounded by ocean on three sides and sitting astride the confluence of the African and Asian continents, the Arabian Peninsula has long been at the center of global economic, political, and cultural circulations. Its seaports were, and continue to be, spaces of great cosmopolitan interaction, linking—through kinship networks, mercantile ties, political institutions, and religious circuits—China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent to East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and beyond. As the most important site of pilgrimage and religious learning and early Islamic imperial power, Mecca and Medina stood at the heart of these global diffusions of power, prosperity, and knowledge production.
Despite this history of transregional connection and cosmopolitan identity, however, the approaches that have traditionally framed our knowledge of the Arabian Peninsula rendered it as insular, homogenous, and outside of History’s inexorable march. Analytically, scholars have divided the region into Yemen and the Gulf. Academic research on Yemen, which focused largely on tribe-state relations, yielded a great deal of empirically valuable material. Yet at the same time, it conceptually isolated the country from the global circulations that had birthed Hadramawt, Aden, and Mokha and from the broader historical processes of imperialism and capitalist expansion. Exotic representations of unruly tribes, conservative social mores, and traditional gender roles in North Yemen especially appealed to those with ethnographic inclinations. Processes of state formation, nation building, economic development, and the strengthening of market relations were largely ignored. South Yemen, with its legacy of British colonialism, Marxist revolutionaries, avowedly secular state policies, land redistribution, and campaigns for gender equality received virtually no scholarly recognition. Compounding the effects of this historically prevalent approach, the overwhelming dominance of the nation-state as a unit of analysis obscured social identities, political formations, and economic connections that were not neatly circumscribed by national boundaries.
The Gulf was, for the most part, exceptionalized through other means—most prominently, through a narrowly presentist focus on oil rents and the ways in which these financial flows shaped political power and socio-cultural life. This approach, developed primarily from Hossein Mahdavy’s rentier state model, aimed to explain the structures of national economies dependent primarily on “external rents” derived from state-controlled natural resources. This framing device has been deployed to explain everything from the persistence of authoritarian forms of governance and the lack of citizen activism and democratic participation to the maintenance of patriarchal societal norms and conservative religious practices. In doing so, this literature has largely elided not only the role of imperial power and the long history of progressive activism and social movements, but also class formation and the connections of Gulf societies to global capitalist development.
Navigating our Critical interventions and new approaches
For many scholars, the popular mobilizations that surged the length and breadth of the Arabian Peninsula since 2011 confirmed that the analytical concepts of the past are no longer adequate (if they ever had been) for understanding the societies and states of the region. This pedagogy publication, intended for college students of any level, educators, journalists, activists and other serious observers of the Middle East, equips readers/students for a critical intellectual engagement with the Arabian Peninsula in two ways. First, it delivers an overview of the historically dominant approaches to studying the region and the kinds of methodological, epistemological, ethical, and political problems that emerge from this work. Second, it proposes alternative ways of “knowing” the Arabian Peninsula by introducing an emerging, theoretically-grounded body of academic work that addresses these concerns. Structured as a roundtable composed of scholars at the cutting edges of their respective disciplines, each contribution was written both in response to the same series of questions and in relation to the other authors’ contributions. As such, Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula may be read/taught in two different ways:
Readers/students, by the end of the roundtable, should be able to answer the following questions:
To elicit a deeper engagement with these questions, educators may wish to address specific topics or issues. The following questions serve as suggestions:
It is our hope that—through the plurality of the critical and informed voices in this roundtable conversation—readers will be able to locate the direction in which the scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula is moving and to develop their own approach to understanding the region. With this in mind, a bibliographic resources section, arranged according to the issues and themes raised in the various contributions, follows the roundtable. Rather than being comprehensive, it selects the latest and most critically informed academic work on the Arabian Peninsula. At the same time, it provides a limited theoretical and comparative literature from outside of the region to suggest new directions and insights. The volume ends with a resource section on social media that lists Twitter accounts, blogs, and websites. These digital sources are for the most part written by those from and living in the region and thus provide an invaluable conduit through which the oft-silenced voices of the Arabian Peninsula might be heard.
[See more inside...]
Bounded by ocean on three sides and sitting astride the confluence of the African and Asian continents, the Arabian Peninsula has long been at the center of global economic, political, and cultural circulations. Its seaports were, and continue to be, spaces of great cosmopolitan interaction, linking—through kinship networks, mercantile ties, political institutions, and religious circuits—China, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent to East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and beyond. As the most important site of pilgrimage and religious learning and early Islamic imperial power, Mecca and Medina stood at the heart of these global diffusions of power, prosperity, and knowledge production.
Despite this history of transregional connection and cosmopolitan identity, however, the approaches that have traditionally framed our knowledge of the Arabian Peninsula rendered it as insular, homogenous, and outside of History’s inexorable march. Analytically, scholars have divided the region into Yemen and the Gulf. Academic research on Yemen, which focused largely on tribe-state relations, yielded a great deal of empirically valuable material. Yet at the same time, it conceptually isolated the country from the global circulations that had birthed Hadramawt, Aden, and Mokha and from the broader historical processes of imperialism and capitalist expansion. Exotic representations of unruly tribes, conservative social mores, and traditional gender roles in North Yemen especially appealed to those with ethnographic inclinations. Processes of state formation, nation building, economic development, and the strengthening of market relations were largely ignored. South Yemen, with its legacy of British colonialism, Marxist revolutionaries, avowedly secular state policies, land redistribution, and campaigns for gender equality received virtually no scholarly recognition. Compounding the effects of this historically prevalent approach, the overwhelming dominance of the nation-state as a unit of analysis obscured social identities, political formations, and economic connections that were not neatly circumscribed by national boundaries.
The Gulf was, for the most part, exceptionalized through other means—most prominently, through a narrowly presentist focus on oil rents and the ways in which these financial flows shaped political power and socio-cultural life. This approach, developed primarily from Hossein Mahdavy’s rentier state model, aimed to explain the structures of national economies dependent primarily on “external rents” derived from state-controlled natural resources. This framing device has been deployed to explain everything from the persistence of authoritarian forms of governance and the lack of citizen activism and democratic participation to the maintenance of patriarchal societal norms and conservative religious practices. In doing so, this literature has largely elided not only the role of imperial power and the long history of progressive activism and social movements, but also class formation and the connections of Gulf societies to global capitalist development.
Navigating our Critical interventions and new approaches
For many scholars, the popular mobilizations that surged the length and breadth of the Arabian Peninsula since 2011 confirmed that the analytical concepts of the past are no longer adequate (if they ever had been) for understanding the societies and states of the region. This pedagogy publication, intended for college students of any level, educators, journalists, activists and other serious observers of the Middle East, equips readers/students for a critical intellectual engagement with the Arabian Peninsula in two ways. First, it delivers an overview of the historically dominant approaches to studying the region and the kinds of methodological, epistemological, ethical, and political problems that emerge from this work. Second, it proposes alternative ways of “knowing” the Arabian Peninsula by introducing an emerging, theoretically-grounded body of academic work that addresses these concerns. Structured as a roundtable composed of scholars at the cutting edges of their respective disciplines, each contribution was written both in response to the same series of questions and in relation to the other authors’ contributions. As such, Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula may be read/taught in two different ways:
- By author—either individually or sequentially, as it is structured;
- By question—compiling all seven responses to a single question or group of questions.
Readers/students, by the end of the roundtable, should be able to answer the following questions:
- What are the historically dominant approaches to studying the Arabian Peninsula?
- How do these analytical models open up certain avenues for inquiry while foreclosing others?
- In what ways does recent theoretical work help us recognize the complexity and interconnectedness of life in the region that may be obscured by other analytical frameworks?
- How are we to understand the complex interplay between knowledge production and local, regional, and global power relations?
- How does the work introduced in this roundtable inspire new ways of thinking about and teaching the Arabian Peninsula and the modern Middle East?
To elicit a deeper engagement with these questions, educators may wish to address specific topics or issues. The following questions serve as suggestions:
- What does rentier state theory entail? How can we think about the relationship between oil, politics, and everyday life differently?
- What are the underlying assumptions about sectarianism in popular culture? How might we think more productively about religion and politics?
- How does the use of the nation-state as a unit of analysis highlight certain kinds of knowledge while obscuring others?
It is our hope that—through the plurality of the critical and informed voices in this roundtable conversation—readers will be able to locate the direction in which the scholarship on the Arabian Peninsula is moving and to develop their own approach to understanding the region. With this in mind, a bibliographic resources section, arranged according to the issues and themes raised in the various contributions, follows the roundtable. Rather than being comprehensive, it selects the latest and most critically informed academic work on the Arabian Peninsula. At the same time, it provides a limited theoretical and comparative literature from outside of the region to suggest new directions and insights. The volume ends with a resource section on social media that lists Twitter accounts, blogs, and websites. These digital sources are for the most part written by those from and living in the region and thus provide an invaluable conduit through which the oft-silenced voices of the Arabian Peninsula might be heard.
[See more inside...]
