Int. J. Middle East Stud. 46 (2014), 5–30doi:10.1017/S0020743813001268

Farah Al-Nakib

REVISITING H. AD. AR AND BADU IN KUWAIT:

CITIZENSHIP, HOUSING, AND THE

CONSTRUCTION OF A DICHOTOMY

AbstractKuwait today is 99 percent urbanized. Though hosting a substantial desert population in the past,Kuwait no longer contains any Bedouin who practice a nomadic or pastoral lifestyle. And yet theterm badu remains in popular use in Kuwait to designate a group considered sociologically andculturally distinct from the h. ad. ar, or settled urbanites, which in Kuwait’s context refers solely todescendants of the pre-oil townspeople. This article explores why these social designations stillexist in Kuwait and analyzes the origins of the conflictual relationship between the two groups. Iargue that the persistence of the h. ad. ar/badu dichotomy is an outcome of state-building strategiesadopted in the early oil years, mainly linked to citizenship and housing policies, that contributed tofixing h. ad. ar and badu as not only socially distinct but also geographically bounded groups. Thesestate policies implemented between the 1950s and 1980s fostered the political integration butsocial exclusion of the badu. The article examines the lived realities of these incoherent policiesas one way of explaining how the badu shifted from being the rulers’ main loyalty base in theearly oil decades to becoming their primary opposition today.

The h. ad. ar/sedentary versus badu/nomadic distinction has for centuries been “the axisdividing the population [of Arabia] into two districts.”1 However, as Madawi Al-Rasheedargues, historically h. ad. ar and badu were not necessarily isolated groups. Though theydeveloped their own identities through the ages, the oases and towns of the region “hadalways been engaged in intense social, economic, and political interaction” with thedesert, which “fostered the existence of cultural continuity rather than dichotomy.”2

This was certainly true of Kuwait’s population historically. Kuwait Town was settled in1716 by a group of families of the �Anizah tribal confederation that migrated from centralArabia to the Gulf coast to escape drought and famine. Over the ensuing centuries Kuwaitdeveloped into a prosperous trading and maritime town that regularly attracted immigrantgroups (both nomadic and settled) from Najd, southern Iraq, Iran, Baluchistan, Yemen,Oman, and the southern Arab Gulf coast. By 1904 the territory of Kuwait consisted ofthe town with 35,000 inhabitants, a handful of agricultural and fishing villages with a

Farah Al-Nakib is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and International Relations andDirector of the Center for Gulf Studies at the American University of Kuwait, Salmiya, Kuwait; e-mail:Falnakib@auk.edu.kw

© Cambridge University Press 2014 0020-7438/14 $15.00

6 Farah Al-Nakib

total of 2,000 residents, and an expanse of desert containing around 13,000 nomadicBedouin (badu in local parlance). The latter were tribes whose dıras or tribal territorieswere within the jurisdiction of the ruling Al Sabah.3 Though they adopted new socialand economic lifestyles after settlement, most town-dwellers and practically all villagers(such as the �Awazim, settled in Dimna, present-day Salmiya) shared lineage with thedesert tribes, reflecting the porosity of these social categories.4

With the launch of the oil industry in the late 1940s, Kuwait’s nomadic Bedouinbegan settling in large numbers as new employment opportunities became available inthe country’s burgeoning oil and industrial sectors. Abandoning their nomadic pastorallifestyle, Kuwait’s last remaining Bedouin began their transition into urban life. Thisprocess was documented by Zahra Freeth—the daughter of the British political agentH.R.P. Dickson, who grew up in Kuwait in the 1930s—during a trip back to the countryin 1970:

Just as the conditions of the desert shaped the rules by which they lived . . . the new settled lifewhich so many badu are adopting when they become wage-earners will in its turn suggest a newset of rules to meet the demands of a sedentary suburban existence. So the badu will change . . . Tothe children who are going to school today the old values and traditions will be largely irrelevant,for they will be trained to a way of thought suited to the competitive world of a modern industrialsociety. They may still take a pride [sic] in their tribal origins, may still say for a generation ortwo ‘our people were badu’, but those who grow up never having lived in a tent nor taken flocksand herds to pasture will not be badu . . . They will be town Arabs. The word badawin cannotbe applied to those who work for wages, live in a house, eat regularly and well, and find theiramusement in the cinema. At the moment the badu are still in a stage of transition, marked by acurious intermingling of old customs and new ways.5

Today, nearly 99 percent of the country’s population is settled, and Kuwait hardly con-tains any Bedouin who practice a nomadic or pastoral lifestyle. Practically all Kuwaitisare now urbanized, and h. ad. ar and badu therefore do not exist as distinct, ontologicalentities. Yet as cultural anthropologist Anh Nga Longva argues, “far from slippinginto oblivion as a result of urbanization,” and despite Freeth’s predictions in 1970, theterm badu remains in popular use in Kuwait today to designate a group consideredsociologically and culturally distinct from the h. ad. ar (the townspeople).6 Moreover, asLongva demonstrates in her 2006 analysis of this h. ad. ar/badu dichotomy in Kuwait,popular discourse reflects a deep-seated animosity between these two groups, one thatis assumed to reflect a historical opposition between h. ad. ar and badu that existed wellbefore the coming of oil. This article continues Longva’s search for why this dichotomystill exists in Kuwait, but with some significant analytical differences.

While popular discourse in Kuwait today primarily cites cultural incompatibility asthe reason for this dichotomy, wide and discordant cultural gaps between h. ad. ar and baduwere not pronounced in the pre-oil era.7 Longva argues that “we need to understandthe ongoing hadhar criticism of the badu as an expression of anti-immigration feelings,of the kind one commonly hears in societies where the state has pledged to take incharge the cradle to grave welfare of its citizens.”8 That is, h. ad. ar animosity toward thebadu stems from not wanting to share the nation’s wealth with perceived newcomers.While Longva’s analysis provides an important contribution to our understanding ofthis dichotomy, it is incomplete, because not all who are designated as badu in Kuwait

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 7

today are in fact newcomers. Longva’s study, which focuses primarily on discourse andperceptions that existed at the time of her research between 1997 and 2004, containssome historical gaps that the current article seeks to fill. To explain the existence of ah. ad. ar/badu dichotomy today despite the fact that nearly all of Kuwait’s inhabitants arenow settled urbanites, we need to identify the historical factors that contributed to thisdichotomy. What hindered the outcome Freeth envisioned in 1970, whereby the baduwould be assimilated and the term no longer used to designate a distinct social group?

While agreeing with Longva that historical–cultural incompatibility is not a sufficientexplanation, the main argument of this paper is that the existence of the h. ad. ar/badudichotomy in Kuwait today is an outcome of state-building strategies adopted in the earlyoil decades of the 1950s and 1960s, and maintained through the 1980s. It has been well-established by political scientists like Jill Crystal, Nicolas Gavrielides, Shafeeq Ghabra,and Abdullah Alhajeri that after the creation of the Kuwaiti parliament in 1963 the badubecame the primary political allies of the Al Sabah rulers and a counterbalance to thelong-standing political opposition of the merchants (the rulers’ historical adversaries,whose demands for power-sharing escalated in the 1930s) and nationalist progressives(who became the dominant opposition force in the 1950s), both of which were urbangroups. Certain naturalization and electoral districting policies implemented from thelate 1960s onwards established the “tribes” (qaba�il) as a distinct political category andensured their political support for the government. Though discussing these particularstate-building strategies that, whether intentionally or inadvertently, pitted the h. ad. arand badu against each other in the realm of politics, this paper steps away from thecommon political analysis and examines the implementation and impact of variousstate policies at the more micro level of lived reality to explain why the h. ad. ar/badudichotomy still exists and where the antagonistic sentiments that frame this dichotomycome from. Against this historical background, we can better understand a new andperhaps unexpected development that has occurred in Kuwaiti politics in the years sinceLongva’s 2006 article: the transformation of the badu from the Al Sabah’s main loyaltybase to their primary and arguably most confrontational opposition in history.

The fact that the rulers’ erstwhile supporters have become their principal adversariessuggests a failure in early state-building strategies that sought to use the badu to offsetother oppositional forces. In her article on state-building in kin-based societies in theMiddle East, Mounira Charrad identifies three strategies that central powers in postcolo-nial nation-states have used toward local patrimonial networks (specifically tribes) inprocesses of state formation: full marginalization, full integration, or shifts between pe-riods of one or the other.9 In Kuwait’s case, although we see evidence of both integrationand marginalization in the state’s treatment of the badu from the 1950s onwards, thesedid not occur in shifts; rather, political integration and social marginalization occurredsimultaneously. This incoherent reality made state strategies toward the badu untenablein the long term.

It is important to note here that tribes have not been the only group to be co-optedas political allies by the government. Several studies on Kuwaiti parliamentary politicshave clearly demonstrated how, after independence in 1961 and the loss of Britishbacking, Kuwait’s rulers regularly searched for political allies to balance their old urbanmerchant adversaries with Bedouin, Shi�a, nationalist progressives, and Islamists, “inturn politicizing each community” and constantly needing to restrategize to maintain

8 Farah Al-Nakib

political equilibrium.10 Such strategies are of course common in many political systems,and it is not my objective to assess their validity, success, or failure in the Kuwaiti context.Rather, my aim is to analyze how such strategies relate to questions of integration andmarginalization in the particular case of Kuwait’s badu population, and to highlightthe spatial dimensions of these issues in an attempt to answer Longva’s question asto why h. ad. ar and badu still exist as seemingly fixed and mutually exclusive socialcategories today. This dichotomy cannot be divorced from a discussion of a spatialpolitics that fixed the h. ad. ar and badu as not only distinct but also geographically boundedgroups.

French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre argues that in order to impose and consolidateits control, the modern state apparatus organizes both space and society in a manner thatensures “the homogeneity of the whole, and the segregation of the parts.”11 In Kuwait, thehomogeneity of the whole was established through the provision of Kuwaiti citizenshipand access to cradle-to-grave welfare benefits, which ensured citizens’ full dependenceon the state. The “segregation of the parts” was primarily realized through state housingpolicies that divided the population into discrete social residential zones and, throughthe provision of different and unequal standards and facilities within these differentdistricts, created a “hierarchy of spaces” associated with particular social groups (withthe former townspeople at the top and the newly sedentarizing badu at the bottom).12

The bulk of this article focuses on state housing policies implemented from the 1950sthrough the 1980s which, I argue, prevented the integration of the badu into Kuwaitiurban society despite the fact that they were no longer technically Bedouin (hence thepersistence of the dichotomy). While these state policies helped establish the badu as aseparate political faction, maintaining the badu’s long-term loyalty was impossible asthe same policies made them an excluded and marginalized group in Kuwaiti society(hence their present-day opposition).

P R E - O I L C O M M U N I T I E S

Though they lived in different spatial and social worlds before oil, regular and closeinteraction occurred between Kuwait’s townspeople, Bedouin, and villagers that “blurredthe divisions” between them.13 Trade relations were strong, and the land- and sea-based economies were intrinsically linked. Bedouin traders often pitched their tents inthe open space beyond the town market when they came to trade and buy supplies,creating a tribal “suburb” just outside the urban limits.14 By the early 20th centuryup to 90 percent of Kuwait’s pearling fleet consisted of Bedouin divers and sailors.15

During the pearling season from May to September, the tribes’ women and childrenwere settled in large camps on the edge of Kuwait Town to be protected by the rulerand townspeople in the men’s absence.16 Today, however, this interdependence betweenKuwait’s pre-oil sedentary and nomadic worlds has been replaced with a popular rhetoricthat identifies the badu as antagonistic outsiders. The building of a fortified town wall(sur) in 1920 has become emblematic of this supposed conflict between town anddesert. It is commonly, though inaccurately, assumed that the sur’s original purpose wasto protect the townspeople on the inside from hostile tribes on the outside. In reality, thewall was built in the summer of 1920 to safeguard the town from an impending attack by

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 9

FIGURE 1. The pre-oil town with the sur (photo taken 1950). From Planning and Urban Development inKuwait (Kuwait: Kuwait Municipality, 1980), 11. Courtesy of the Kuwait Municipality MasterPlanning Department.

the puritanical Ikhwan forces of the Najdi ruler �Abd al-�Aziz ibn Sa�ud—with whomKuwait’s ruler Salim al-Sabah was in conflict—who had begun attacking tribes withinKuwaiti territory.17 In October the Ikhwan clashed with Salim’s forces in a bloody battlein the agricultural village of Jahra, though Kuwait Town itself was never attacked.18 Thesur—extending in a rough semi-circle behind the town with five gates—was Kuwait’sfirst fortified defense that “completely [shut] off the city from the landward side” (seeFigure 1 and Figure 2).19

Despite the clear and present Ikhwan threat that prompted its construction, present-day commentators suggest that the wall was built to deflect the danger of the desertmore generally, reinventing the sur as a divisive barrier between h. ad. ar and badu.For instance, a Kuwait News Agency article on the history of the sur published on21 February 2009 mentions only that the wall was constructed to ward off enemy attacks(li-dar� hajamat al-a�da�).20 Similarly, a children’s book entitled The Wall of Kuwait byYa�qub al-Ghunaim (published in English and Arabic) claims that the wall was built toprotect the town “against raiders.”21 Neither source refers to the Ikhwan or the battle ofJahra; al-Ghunaim simply says that “Kuwait faced some threats that year” and the wallwas built to “[prevent] any aggression from reaching the capital and [ensure] security forall residents.”22 These accounts evoke the image of an ambiguous and constant menaceagainst the townspeople from outside Bedouin “raiders,” rather than the immediate and

10 Farah Al-Nakib

FIGURE 2. One of the gates. Courtesy of the Kuwait Oil Company archives.

finite threat posed by the Ikhwan. Sources produced at the time, by contrast, reflectthe sudden urgency that went into the wall’s construction in late May 1920: though theBritish high commissioner assured Salim of air and naval assistance in the event of anassault on the town, the ruler did not allow the pearling fleet to leave that summer so themen could build the wall before the Ikhwan had a chance to attack.23

Recent accounts also fail to mention that when the wall was constructed, a large openspace was retained between the wall and the town limits so that “friendly tribesmen,with their herds, may obtain protection there from raiding Bedouins.”24 On the dayof the battle of Jahra the American missionary doctor Stanley Mylrea observed that“refugees from Jahra and the desert were pouring in at the gate, whole families withtheir household effects.”25 British gunboats stationed at either end of the sur had beeninstructed to shoot anyone they saw approaching the town, so a group of Bedouin campednearby was brought inside the gates to avoid being accidentally fired upon.26 The wallwas thus a source of mutual protection against the Ikhwan for tribes, villagers, andtownspeople alike, rather than simply protecting those on the “inside” from those onthe “outside.” Though the wall separated town from desert, its gates were situated onexisting roads leading to the main villages like Jahra and Fahaheel and to the knowncaravan routes, thus maintaining (and reflecting) their historical interdependence.

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 11

S TAT E - B U I L D I N G , C I T I Z E N S H I P, A N D T H E H O M O G E N E I T Y

O F T H E W H O L E

Despite this history, perceptions of the badu today remain similar to those expressed bySaif al-Shamlan in his 1975 memoirs: “the people of the desert—let the truth be said—have had only a slender positive impact on the life of Kuwait. The raids and troubles thathave affected Kuwait and Kuwaitis have come from the desert.” It was the townspeoplewho “formed the foundation of the state,” al-Shamlan continues, thereby alienatingthe badu from Kuwaiti nationhood.27 In 2009, controversial politician Mohammed al-Juwaihel stated on his private television station (aptly called al-Sur) that “true” Kuwaiticitizens consist solely of those families who resided inside the sur and in villages likeJahra and Fahaheel before oil, making the badu sector of society not “real” Kuwaitis.28

The genesis of this h. ad. ar/badu dichotomy can be traced back not to the pre-oilperiod but rather to the advent of new state-building strategies developed during theearly years of rapid change after the launch of the oil industry. Before oil there was,as the British Political Resident put it in 1865, “little Government interference of anykind” in everyday public life.29 The rulers were dependent on merchant capital for thetown’s administration, the financing of public services, and the provision of moneyand materiel to safeguard Kuwait’s independence. In the absence of a state bureau-cratic administration, urban Kuwaitis before oil were dependent on their families, firjan(neighborhoods, sing. farıj), and/or merchant patrons, and the Bedouin and villagers ontheir tribes, for their everyday welfare. With the advent of oil, however, Kuwait’s ruler�Abd Allah al-Salim launched a massive state-led modernization scheme in 1950 thatrapidly put the government at the center of every Kuwaiti citizen’s life and welfare.The institution of Kuwaiti citizenship was key to this state-building project, and tomaintaining the stability of the new state. The creation of a singular Kuwaiti nationalcommunity through citizenship subordinated to the nation-state previous loyalties tofarıj, sect, family, or tribe. As a citizen, regardless of socioeconomic status, occupation,or ethnic background, each Kuwaiti (in theory) had equal access to new privileges such ashealthcare, education, food, employment, land, and housing. All Kuwaitis thus becamedependent on the state for their wellbeing, and the merging of citizenship and statewelfare served to homogenize the Kuwaiti population into a manageable, dependent,and loyal whole.

And yet this homogenizing process did not eliminate the social category of “badu,” asFreeth believed would occur. This was partly due to the nature of the country’s nationalitylaw. The first attempt at defining the requirements for Kuwaiti nationality was made in1948, two years after the launch of the oil industry. Residents whose ancestors hadbeen in Kuwait since 1899 were defined as citizens, as were children born in Kuwait tonon-Kuwaitis, while Arabs or Muslims living there for up to ten years could apply forcitizenship.30 However, Kuwait’s first census in 1957 revealed that foreigners flocking tothe country for work opportunities already constituted 45 percent of the population.31 Amore restrictive nationality law was therefore passed in 1959 that removed the options ofcitizenship by birthright or long-term residence. The law defined Kuwaitis “originally”(asasan) as those persons whose families were “settled in Kuwait” (al-mutawat.t.inun fıal-kuwayt) by 1920.32 The only option for people who did not meet these requirementsto be naturalized as Kuwaiti was by decree from the minister of interior.

12 Farah Al-Nakib

The authorities attempted to identify and register Kuwaiti citizens for the first time inpreparation for independence in 1961, and all people who considered themselves Kuwaitihad to apply to special committees during fixed enrollment periods to prove their status.The townspeople could furnish adequate documentation—land deeds, birth and deathcertificates, travel documents—as proof of settlement in Kuwait by 1920. The tribesthat grazed and camped beyond the sur, however, were not permanently settled and didnot possess such documentary evidence. About one-third of the Kuwaiti population (notcounting recently arriving foreigners with nationality papers from other countries) wasrecognized as qualifying for “original” citizenship and classified as Kuwaitis bi-l-ta�sıs,meaning “by establishment” or founding. These were predominantly town-dwellers andsome villagers. Another third, consisting mainly of members of Bedouin tribes who hadnot been permanently settled in Kuwait Town before oil,

either because [they] failed to understand the importance of citizenship or, given their centuries-old nomadic way of life, demurred at the idea of belonging to any one country, or because theywere living outside the city walls, in the desert or ‘badiya,’ and often illiterate, they could notfurnish adequate proof that they were settled in the country . . . were consequently classified asstateless.33

These stateless people were designated as “without citizenship” or bidun jinsiyya (morecommonly known simply as bidun).

The remaining third of the population occupied a more ambiguous category. Thesewere individuals or families who did not meet the legal requirements for citizenship bi-l-ta�sıs but were naturalized as citizens by ministerial decree.34 Though some villagersand Arab expatriates were part of this group, the majority were badu granted citizenshipin exchange for joining the army (particularly after the attempt of Iraq’s ruler �Abd al-Karim Qasim to annex Kuwait in 1961).35 Those Kuwaitis who became citizens throughnaturalization (bi-l-tajnıs) were classified differently from citizens bi-l-ta�sıs (who carryjinsiyya ula or “first-level citizenship”). While members of the two categories held equalrights to employment, land ownership, and welfare benefits, naturalized citizens couldnot vote or run for parliament until thirty years after their naturalization.36

The 1959 nationality law thus created fixed categories of Kuwaiti citizens in relationto time of settlement. The term bi-l-ta�sıs emphasized the difference between “original”and “newcomer” that has become such a prominent part of the h. ad. ar/badu discoursein Kuwait. Those who were settled by 1920—the townspeople and, to some extent, thevillagers—were fixed as original Kuwaitis by law. Those who were not settled, even ifnaturalized as Kuwaitis, were inherently newcomers regardless of their historic ties to orlength of residence in Kuwait. The changing of the cut-off date for Kuwaiti nationalitybi-l-ta�sıs from 1899 (in the 1948 law) to 1920 (in the 1959 law) further emphasizedthe law’s privileging of the urban: 1920 was popularly known as sanat al-jahra (theyear of Jahra, referring to the Ikhwan’s assault on the village that October) and closelyassociated with the building of the wall.37 In a sense, then, by fixing 1920 as the newfoundation upon which Kuwaiti nationality became based, the law constituted the suras the socio-spatial boundary for original Kuwaiti identity (rather than, for instance,the national borders drawn in 1922). This explains why the sur remains, in Longva’swords, “a powerful trope in the discursive construction of hadhar identity.” As she notes,urban Kuwaitis rarely refer to themselves as h. ad. ar and more commonly express their

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 13

collective identity against the badu as simply “Kuwaitis” or as ahl al-sur, people insidethe wall.38

The new nationality law was passed in the wake of the 1950s Arab nationalist move-ment that gained much popular support in Kuwait. Kuwait’s nationalists—who wereprimarily from the urban middle class—aligned their Pan-Arab agenda with demandsfor social and political reforms at home. When one of their leaders, Jassim al-Qatami,called for the end of “tribal family rule” (al-h. ukm al-�asha�irı) at a public rally in 1959(a barely veiled attack against the Al Sabah), �Abd Allah al-Salim banned all nationalistactivities for two years.39 It was in this context that the 1959 law supplanted the 1948law. The new law distanced Kuwaitis from potentially contaminating Arab expatriates—who began to outnumber Kuwaitis during this early oil period of rapid modernizationand increased immigration—by denying the latter the right to apply for citizenship. Italso created a singular and exclusive national community to replace all other loyalties,including Arab nationalism. This may explain the law’s privileging of the townspeople,the group the state most needed to appease in this era of regional unrest.40

Whatever the intentions, the nationality law’s emphasis on origin played a significantrole in fixing the badu as newcomers. This was exacerbated by developments after1967 when, in exchange for electoral loyalty to counter the nationalist opposition inparliament, the government began granting citizenship by decree to tens of thousandsof nonlocal badu, mostly from Saudi Arabia.41 Most were given jinsiyya ula so theycould vote and bolster progovernment forces in the legislature. Despite obtaining fullcitizenship, the language of the nationality law kept these “new immigrants” permanentlyoutside the contours of what it means (legally and discursively) to be Kuwaiti.42 Norwere they fully integrated into Kuwaiti society in practice, as will be seen below, whichfurther reinforced their status as “outsiders.” Also, the granting of citizenship bi-l-ta�sısto people who were not original to Kuwait (though they were to the deserts of the region)confounded the notions of origin first created by the 1959 nationality law and createdmyriad tensions. First, it fostered h. ad. ar perceptions of the badu as newcomers and asociopolitical threat to their own identity. Second, it shifted the meaning of the termbadu, which in Kuwaiti discourse now focuses almost entirely on this group. As Longvademonstrates, whereas h. ad. ar “designates Kuwaitis whose forefathers lived in Kuwaitbefore the launch of the oil era (1946),” the term badu “designates a specific group ofnewcomers: these are immigrants, mostly from Saudi Arabia, who used to live on animalpastoralism; they moved to Kuwait between 1960 and 1980 . . . and have been grantedKuwaiti nationality over the years since then.”43 Whereas the village residents tend to beidentified as h. ad. ar, the Bedouin tribes who were historically recognized as being tied toKuwait do not fit in either social category in present-day discourse. Many of these badu,who had “[fallen] through the cracks” of the 1959 nationality law,44 became “resentfulat the inclusion of recently settled badu among first-category citizens when so many oftheir own number have been denied that status.”45 In addition to being excluded frompresent-day perceptions of “original” Kuwaitis despite their long-standing history withthe place, as well as from the category of badu (which focuses on the “new immigrant”tribes), those who became stateless or bidun are also often excluded from popularperceptions of that social category. There is a misconception in Kuwaiti discourse todaythat the stateless or bidun are people who came from somewhere else (Syria, Jordan,Iraq) and destroyed their original nationality papers. Though such groups certainly exist

14 Farah Al-Nakib

within the stateless population, a substantial proportion consists of local badu who werenever granted citizenship.46 As such, these long-standing tribes are entirely misplacedin popular perceptions and definitions of the various social groups that exist in Kuwaittoday.

While recognizing that terms like h. ad. ar and badu have little analytical validity todayas the vast majority of Kuwaitis are settled urbanites who live similar lifestyles, theterms are used throughout this article to designate the following socially constructedcategories, based on nationality policies. While h. ad. ar relates to the people who had beensettled in the town and villages before oil, badu relates to all tribes who had not beenpermanently settled in Kuwait Town or the villages prior to the advent of the oil industryin 1946, and who are now Kuwaiti citizens (bi-l-ta�sıs and bi-l-tajnıs). In my use of theterm badu I include both the tribes closely associated with Kuwait who began settlingin shantytowns from the 1940s onwards, as well as those brought in by the state fromSaudi Arabia beginning in the late 1960s for political purposes. This combined group,it is believed, now constitutes around 60 percent of the Kuwaiti national population,though the Kuwaiti census does not give specific information based on such socialdesignations.47 As the main focus of the remainder of this article is on state housingpolicies, I do not include in my use of the term badu the tribes historically associatedwith Kuwait who became and remain bidun. The stateless people do not have access tostate welfare schemes nor do they possess political rights; they therefore fall outside thescope of this article’s main arguments. In Kuwaiti popular discourse, the word qaba�il(tribes) is used when referring to the badu as a political faction, and is therefore alsoused below in relation to political opposition, though the terms refer to the same socialsector.

S TAT E H O U S I N G P O L I C Y A N D T H E S E G R E G AT I O N O F T H E PA RT S

While the advent of the nationality law created a binary distinction between citizensand noncitizens, the restrictive requirements of the 1959 law coupled with the state’scontroversial naturalization policies contributed to the creation of two distinct categoriesof citizens: originals versus newcomers. State welfare also played a key role in thisprocess. Though welfare services including education, healthcare, and housing wereprovided to all citizens in law, in reality stark inequalities in benefits accorded tothe former townspeople and the sedentarizing badu fostered perceptions of these asmutually exclusive groups rather than unifying them as equal Kuwaiti citizens. There is aconceptual distinction between nationality and citizenship in Kuwait. While nationality isdefined by law and conferred at the age of eighteen in a nationality document or jinsiyya,citizenship (one’s status as a member of the Kuwaiti national community) is largelyassociated with the access to state welfare benefits that comes with this nationality.48 AliMadanipour argues that social integration largely revolves around access to equitableresources; restricted access to such resources fosters exclusion.49 Furthermore, “Manyof these forms of access have clear spatial manifestations, as space is the site in whichthese different forms of access are made possible or denied.”50 State housing policiesimplemented from the 1950s to the 1980s, which spatially segregated sectors of Kuwaitisociety and explicitly differentiated between them in styles and standards, relegated thebadu to an inferior status as citizens. Such policies are arguably the most important

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 15

factor in answering Longva’s question as to why h. ad. ar and badu still exist as mutuallyexclusive and oppositional social categories in Kuwait.

“The distribution of land and government-built houses,” Longva argues, “does nottake into consideration the recipient’s background and thus is leading to a graduallowering of social barriers in the newer residential areas.”51 Though this may be said ofstate housing policies today, when such policies were introduced in the early 1950s theywere designed precisely according to the recipient’s background. With the advent of oil,housing became the primary method of wealth distribution and the most important statebenefit promising to improve the living standards of Kuwaitis. Moving the populationinto modern accommodations was also a principal component of the government’s newurban development plans. The 1952 master plan required the relocation of the townspeo-ple out of the old town so that the city center could be redeveloped. In the 1960s, planswere made to develop villages like Jahra and Salmiya and to move their inhabitants intomodern housing, while the sedentarizing badu were also to be permanently settled. Thegovernment did not develop one state-wide housing scheme equally and simultaneouslyapplicable to all these groups, but rather developed three separate schemes that notonly kept them segregated but also contributed to fixing them as socio-spatially distinctcategories.

The townspeople were targeted first. The state-commissioned master plan for KuwaitCity, designed by a British town planning firm in 1952, designated the space of the oldtown as a commercial and government center that needed to become more accommodat-ing to cars. The old clusters of courtyard houses were demolished, and new suburbs wereconstructed just outside the wall to re-house the displaced townspeople. A new ring andradial road system was created; the First Ring Road was constructed just outside andparallel to the semi-circular path of the sur (demolished in 1957), and the additional ringsmimicked its shape as they emanated away from the urban center.52 The five gates werephysically preserved and it was from these points that the radial roads connecting thering roads extended. The sur thus served as the basis of Kuwait’s now familiar highwaysystem, which established the boundaries of the new residential suburbs. Eight suburbswere constructed within three ring roads in the 1950s; in 1960 a fourth ring was addedand seven additional neighborhoods were built by 1968. These fifteen suburbs becameknown in official and popular discourse as al-manat.iq al-numudhajiyya or the “modelareas” (see Figure 3 and Figure 4).

To facilitate the relocation of urban families, the government established a landacquisition scheme (tathmın al-arad. ı) in 1951 whereby land inside the sur was purchasedfrom the townspeople at deliberately inflated prices, to be used for public or commercialdevelopment. The state viewed tathmın as the quickest form of oil revenue distribution,and it was the principal form of wealth accumulation for most urban Kuwaitis afteroil.53 It also helped accelerate “an almost wholesale exodus” to the suburbs.54 Threehousing options were made available to the townspeople in the new suburbs, dependingon income: they could obtain a plot of residential land on which to build their home, aplot in conjunction with an interest-free thirty-year loan to build, or a government-built“limited-income group” (LIG) house.55

In 1964 a new scheme was developed for re-housing the residents of the villages ofSalmiya, Jahra, Farwaniya, and the southern coastal Adan district who had obtainedKuwaiti nationality. Like the townspeople, citizens in these villages whose property was

16 Farah Al-Nakib

FIGURE 3. The 1952 Master Plan. Adapted from Stephen Gardiner, Kuwait: The Making of a City (Essex:Longman Group Ltd., 1983), 41. Courtesy of the Kuwait Municipality Master Planning Depart-ment.

acquired by the state were entitled to a plot of land or LIG housing. However, whereas thetownspeople were relocated to new suburbs between the First and Fourth Ring Roads,the villagers could only procure new housing in the same village in which their previousproperty had been acquired, limiting their ability to move to the more central urban areas(see Figure 5).56

The only group without access to tathmın income was the badu, who from the late1940s began settling in spontaneous shanty settlements. Most of these badu had workedin the now-collapsed pearling industry and began working as laborers in the oil sectoror in the country’s new army and police forces. The shantytowns also attracted low-income expatriate laborers who could not afford to pay rent elsewhere. Originally, theywere located in close proximity to the residents’ place of employment: Maqwa� andWara� served the oil center of Ahmadi, Jleeb Al-Shuyukh served the industrial center ofShuwaikh,57 and Shamiya (just beyond the sur) served the city. However, “when Kuwaitfound a new sense of its own self-importance” during the 1950s, the shantytowns nearthe city center “were considered degrading to the town’s modern image.”58 By the 1960sthey had all been moved far away from the city and the new suburbs.

In 1965 there were 11,659 shanty homes, made out of palm thatching, wood, andcorrugated iron. By 1970, Colin Buchanan and Partners (CBP, the British firm thatdesigned Kuwait’s second master plan) estimated that the number had doubled to around20,400. The shanty population rose from 64,800 in 1965 to 113,400 in 1970. CBP

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 17

FIGURE 4. Al-manat.iq al-numudhajiyya between the First and Fourth Ring Roads. Courtesy of PatrickSemaan.

estimated that about 80 percent of these were Kuwaitis.59 The reports claim that thereason for the doubling of shanty-dwellers was the inflow of badu who had been settledand granted citizenship in these years, “partly for reasons of political stability.”60 Theyestimated that some 70,000 shanty dwellers were from this group.61

Freeth described the shanties she saw in 1970 as having “an air of depressingsqualor.”62 Their residents had “fallen through the sieve of the welfare state” and workedin the lowest-paying jobs.63 Most men in the shantytowns earned salaries of around 40to 60 Kuwaiti dinars per month. Though many of the residents were Kuwaiti nationals orbidun employed in the military, and thus legally eligible for state housing, until the early1970s few measures were taken to re-house them in state-provided accommodation.Many shanty-dwellers began petitioning the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor fornew housing in the mid-1960s, to no avail.64 The townspeople had been moved out ofthe city because the government needed the space to implement the 1952 master plan;the shanty areas lay well beyond the planned urban development area in the 1950s and1960s, and so remained outside the immediate sphere of state concern.

That is not to say that nothing was done in the 1960s to solve the shanty problem.After independence in 1961, Kuwait began positioning itself to take up “a distinctposition alongside the civilised and developed world states,”65 and the presence ofthese “aesthetic blotches on the landscape”66 did not align with its nahd. a al-�umraniyya

18 Farah Al-Nakib

FIGURE 5. The villages. Courtesy of Patrick Semaan.

(architectural awakening).67 Between 1962 and 1968 around 1,400 LIG homes weretherefore allocated for tah. d. ır al-badu (badu settlement) in new areas like Omariya,Sabahiya, and Badawiya.68 But it was not until 1970, with the significant growth of theshanty population, that the government, in conjunction with the CBP planners, began toseriously plan for the re-housing of Kuwaiti shanty residents (though foreign and bidunresidents were not part of this scheme).

The objective of this mashru� al-badiya (desert project)69 was not just to providebetter housing and services to Kuwaiti citizens living in appalling conditions but alsoto facilitate “as smooth a transition as possible from tribal life to urban life.”70 Astaging process for badu settlement was therefore adopted. First, in the early 1970sthe many scattered and spontaneously built shantytowns were consolidated into threelarge settlements in Shadadiya, Sayhad, and Doha as a temporary solution.71 Thesegovernment-designated shanty areas were bound by high-wire perimeter fences, givingthem “the rather forbidding aspect of a concentration camp.”72 The next step was tomove shanty residents into temporary housing known as sha�biyya or “popular” housingin areas like Sulaibiya, Jleeb al-Shuyukh, and Jahra. Though more solid than shanties,sha�biyya houses were constructed very cheaply, using locally made gray concrete

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 19

bricks without any plastering, painting, or other finishing applied, and the settlementareas contained no paved roads, “just the sandy surface of the desert.”73 By the mid-1970s, plans were made for more permanent large-scale Bedouin LIG housing projectsin areas like Mina Abdullah, Jahra, and �Ardhiya, and private international firms werecommissioned to finance, design, and build a “completely new suburbia in the desert.”74

Most residents of the sha�biyya areas like Sulaibiya were eventually transferred to thesenew projects. The sha�biyya houses were then populated by bidun shanty-dwellers noteligible for state housing, who remain there today.

Despite claims to be introducing the badu to al-h. ayat al-h. ad. ariyya or settled urbanlife,75 this complex process kept the badu in a state of impermanence well into the 1980s.Though the original shantytowns were successfully consolidated into three main areas,families were often forced to move from one new settlement to another. For instance,in 1978 6,000 families in Shadadiya (forced to move there from another shantytownthree years earlier) had to move to Sayhad due to the planning of a new national parknearby.76 Nor did things improve once the badu moved out of the new settlements intosha�biyya housing. In 1979, families arriving in Sulaibiya found that the area still hadno electricity. By summer the brick houses became so hot that the residents moved intotents (buyut sha�ar) in the desert.77 Many families also moved back into buyut sha�arafter the municipality demolished 16,000 shanties en masse in 1978 before sufficientreplacement housing was prepared. According to Khalaf Madlul, “In the beginning welived in shanties in Doha, then were moved to Sayhad, then to Shadadiya, and then whenthey were demolished we had no choice but to start over in a tent.”78 By 1982 newspontaneous shanty settlements had emerged again on the outskirts of Jahra.79

The purported aim of the badu settlement program was to integrate the tribes into“Kuwait’s urbanized society” (mujtama� al-kuwayt al-mutah. ad. ir).80 In reality, it fosteredthe exclusion of the badu from that society, making many feel as though they were “cutoff from everything but the grace of God.”81 The most noteworthy aspect of all thetah. d. ır al-badu settlement schemes was the distance between these areas and the citycenter (see Figure 6). Rather than incorporating these projects within the new residentialdistricts between the First and Fourth Ring Roads, the government constructed separateareas well beyond the Fifth and Sixth Ring Roads.82 These areas were cut off from thecity and from al-manat.iq al-numudhajiyya. Large-scale shanty camps like Shadadiyahad no paved access roads, though residents regularly asked that roads be built to “linkus to Kuwait City.”83 The desert path leading to and from Shadadiya was riddled withnails and construction debris, and the high risk of tire damage prohibited buses, taxis,and even ambulances from getting to the settlement.84 Things did not improve in the newlarge-scale LIG housing projects. When Sabahiya was built, for instance, once again noaccess roads were prepared and residents without cars had to walk across two kilometersof desert before reaching the highway to catch a ride to work.85

The justification for locating their areas far away from the city was that badu neededeasy access to open desert for grazing and also had “the emotional need to be inan environment which is not completely cut off from the desert open spaces.”86 Theviability of this argument is questionable, however, as many badu who were allocatedhouses in outlying areas like Riqqa, Omariya, and Sabahiya in the early 1970s rejectedthem due to the distance from the urban center where they worked (exacerbated by thelack of sufficient roads).87 The Undersecretary of Social Affairs and Labor admitted in

20 Farah Al-Nakib

FIGURE 6. Some of the outlying badu settlement areas. Courtesy of Patrick Semaan.

1971 that the majority of applicants for government housing, including badu, specifiedthe city as their preferred residence. The fact that at the peak of the new settlementscheme “the number of people rejecting their new houses outnumbered the peopleapplying for a new house”88 calls into question the notion that the badu had “specialneeds” that required them to be settled in distant areas.89 After all, the urbanization ofthe badu was nothing new to Kuwait; historically “the transition from badu to hadhar[was] . . . the very condition for its existence.”90 In 1963 a Maqwa� resident demandedthat if the government was not going to give him and his fellow shanty-dwellers housesthey should at least be allowed to build their shanties closer to the city, like the earliestsettlement in Shamiya.91 Since the 1940s the badu had been drawn toward the city, butstate housing policies pushed them back out to the desert.

This segregation contributed to fixing h. ad. ar and badu as mutually exclusive, andspatially bounded, social categories. In contrast to al-manat.iq al-numudhajiyya, theareas created for badu settlement were known in official discourse as al-manat.iq al-kharijiyya or the “outlying areas.” As Longva argues, “In naming the badu areas interms that remind of their original status as outsiders, the state contributes to keepingalive the perception of difference between hadhar and badu and the battery of cultural

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 21

images that goes with it.”92 Dividing these two worlds were the country’s ring roads—the Third by the end of the fifties, the Fourth by the end of the sixties, and the Fifth bythe early eighties—encircling the neighborhoods that were “undisputedly ‘hadhar.’” By2006, Longva determined that “the concrete dividing line between the two social worldsis generally considered to be the Sixth,” beyond which lies “‘badu territory.’”93 Thefact that the sur served as the basis of Kuwait’s ring road system inadvertently adds toits association as a symbolic barrier dividing two different and seemingly incompatiblesocial worlds.

Contributing to the isolation of the new LIG housing estates for badu settlement wasthe fact that, because they were situated “beyond the so-called planning limits of thecity,”94 they were designed to be self-contained with full shopping facilities, communityand leisure centers, government offices, schools, clinics, and police stations.95 The planwas to obviate the need for their residents to commute to commercial or service centerswithin the Kuwait City metropolitan area, thereby reducing traffic congestion in the urbancenter.96 While al-manat.iq al-numudhajiyya also contained neighborhood co-operativecenters with a supermarket, pharmacy, clinic, and police station, as well as their ownschools, their residents still relied on the city center and commercial districts like Salmiyafor leisure, shopping, and other services. The spatial distance between al-manat.iq al-numudhajiyya and al-manat.iq al-kharijiyya prevented much social mixing betweentheir residents. Though many badu held low-paying clerical positions in governmentbureaucracies where many h. ad. ar also worked (albeit usually in higher positions), thiscontact was insufficient to foster integration. Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift argue thatcultural hybridization requires meaningful and repeated contact: the slow experienceof working, living, and playing with others.97 However, h. ad. ar and badu were notexperiencing much meaningful and repeated contact outside the workplace that couldcreate deeper social ties between them. As an article in the local newspaper al-Ra�ial-�Amm explained in 1978, “The workplace in Kuwait creates an environment thatcombines different social groups, but since these groups have nothing in common witheach other there is no mixing or social integration. Under these circumstances, the socialadaptation of the badu in society is slow due to restricted social relations.”98

In addition to their spatial isolation, the badu settlements also received significantlyinferior state-provided services. Most significant was the size and quality of housing.Residential plots inside the Fourth Ring Road—where the average family size in 1970was seven people—were between 400 and 750 square meters for government-builthouses, and 750 and 1,000 square meters for self-built homes; all were detached villaswith ample space for gardens and garages.99 A sha�biyya house, by contrast, was onlyfifty square meters with two or three bedrooms and a small living room, though theaverage badu family size was fifteen.100 Even in the new housing estates like Sabahiya,plots were normally only 150 square meters and walls were shared between neighborsin attached row houses.101

Free education and healthcare, like housing, are critical pillars of the state welfaresystem to which Kuwaiti citizens have access. However, the residents of the badusettlement areas did not have sufficient access to these services until the late 1980s.Entrance into public schools and district clinics was based on residential area. Whenthey lived in shantytowns they were not registered in any district and could therefore onlygo to government hospitals in the city and, because they had no legal registered address,

22 Farah Al-Nakib

were forced to pay.102 “We are told that medical care is a right of all citizens,” saidone Maqwa� resident in 1965, “but we are denied access as if we weren’t citizens.”103

Things only slightly improved after they moved into their permanent housing estates.In 1971, Sabahiya’s clinic consisted of a single small room for an area that by 1970contained 866 households.104 There were no schools, and children who were able toattend school in the village of Abu Halaifa had to wake up very early in the morning tomake it on time.105 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the badu residents of these areasdemanded access to the same modern services that Kuwaitis living in the inner suburbswere getting: education in modern schools, proper healthcare, water and electricity,permanent housing, and parks and libraries for their children.106

The stark disparities in housing and public services between the inner and outer dis-tricts, social geographer Abdulrasool al-Moosa argues, imposed “severe social barriersinside the Kuwaiti community.”107 As a 1971 newspaper article on Sabahiya put it:“The face of Kuwait is what we witness in the luxurious houses and villas . . . of thosewith envied incomes; its bowels are the houses of those with limited incomes.”108 Thisreality created feelings of superiority among the former vis-a-vis the latter. In a 1982housing survey, al-Moosa questioned urban Kuwaitis on the desirability of mixing allnationals together in the same residential districts regardless of wealth or social ori-gin. One third of respondents strongly resisted integration, and another third remainedapprehensive. Al-Moosa’s respondents considered residents of the new LIG housingprojects “as inferiors and [treated] them accordingly, a factor that makes integrationmore difficult.”109 The latter, meanwhile, as expressed in another newspaper article in1971, found it increasingly “hard to believe that they live in a country with a threebillion dinar budget and in the same country as the residents of the [inner] suburbs.”110

Many felt excluded from full integration into Kuwaiti society despite being lawful andequal citizens. Residents of the Maqwa� shantytown in 1965 insisted that they had builtand defended Kuwait, “yet here we are living a life of misery and poverty. They don’tgrant us our rights or listen to us.”111 Their long history of association with Kuwait wasregularly cited in newspaper articles on the plight of the shanty-dwellers. “My father,grandfather, grandfather’s grandfather were all born in Kuwait,” Khalaf Madlul fromSulaibiyya stated in 1979, “and we don’t have anywhere else.”112

Residents of the former villages felt a similar sense of exclusion. As a 1979 newspaperarticle on Egaila, a coastal village south of Kuwait City, stated:

Kuwait is witnessing an awakening in different architectural and administrative fields . . . [with]whole cities being built using the most up-to-date techniques, where citizens are offered all theservices needed to implement the government’s policy of creating a society built on equalityand luxury. And yet there are still areas that lack such services and facilities, [whose residents]are demanding the bare minimum to foster an equal living standard between them and the othermodern areas, so that citizens don’t feel a gap between what is available to others and what theyare deprived of.113

Egaila’s residents were still waiting for their old traditional houses to be acquiredby the government with compensation so the area could be properly planned, andnew government housing provided. Most houses were dilapidated and on the verge ofcollapse. With a population of 3,000, the area contained no schools, supermarkets, policestations, paved roads, municipal services, or medical facilities. According to Humud

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 23

al-Sahli, “It’s as if the people living in Egaila are not sons of Kuwait . . . Where isthe equality that all citizens in all areas should be entitled to?”114 Thus, while todayh. ad. ar like the politician Mohammed al-Juwaihel consider the village residents “real”Kuwaitis, they themselves felt excluded from the privileged status of the townspeople.

By the early 1980s, most mudbrick houses, tents, and shanties had been removed fromKuwait’s modern landscape, and the task of re-housing all citizens in new residentialdistricts with the country’s newfound oil income was complete. In 1984 the NationalHousing Authority standardized the options available for all subsequent housing ap-plicants, whereby residential plots and government-built houses were allocated in inte-grated areas that no longer differentiated citizens by income bracket or background.115

However, the economic slump of the 1980s coupled with the Iraqi invasion of 1990and its aftermath meant that such standardized government housing did not start tobe allocated to newly applying citizens until the late 1990s. New residential districtsdeveloped between the Fifth and Seventh Ring Roads over the past fifteen years are moresocially integrated than the older manat.iq al-numudhajiyya and manat.iq al-kharijiyya.Furthermore, the residents of the latter now have better access to education and othersocial services, and improved road networks mean they are no longer spatially cut offfrom the main metropolitan areas. Nonetheless, the stigma of their long-term spatialisolation and distance from the city center continues to differentiate the badu in Kuwaitisociety despite these changes.

This stigma is poignantly reflected in the 2007 film Sharq, written by a group of youngh. ad. ar men. The film is about six “small-town Kuwaiti boys” from Jahra who decideto venture into “the sprawling metropolis of Kuwait City” to buy a new soccer ball.116

The film begins with boys playing soccer barefoot in the desert with no sign of nearbybuildings or roads. Kuwait City is a place they point to on the horizon but which none ofthe boys has ever visited because, as one of them puts it, “we are at the end of the world.”They walk across the empty desert (complete with shots of camels to emphasize theirbadu identity) back to their quiet Jahra neighborhood of run-down sha�biyya housingto steal their father’s pick-up truck (another stereotypical badu trademark). During thedrive, the boys speak mockingly about “them” (the city-dwellers) and their lifestyle.When they finally reach the city the Jahra boys are exposed to an exciting new world:busy markets, highways, expensive cars, grand villas, high-rise buildings, and luxuriousshopping malls. After a long day they end up playing soccer in the grass by the sea with agroup of urban boys. In making the two groups of boys get along despite their supposedcultural differences, the filmmakers suggest that such differences can be easily overcomewith greater contact and social mixing. Despite this message, and though ostensibly asympathetic depiction of badu experiences, the film encompasses the us/them discoursethat shapes the h. ad. ar/badu dichotomy today, both in the boys’ conversation and in thefilm’s depiction of the badu in their isolated, simple, and mundane world far from thebright lights of Sharq.

O P P O S I T I O NA L P O L I T I C S

The spatial isolation of the badu, though resulting in their social marginalization, con-tributed to the government’s strategy of using the tribes to stabilize the existing politicalparadigm and therefore facilitated their political integration. Prior to the 1981 elections,

24 Farah Al-Nakib

after parliament had been unconstitutionally suspended for five years, the ruler Jabiral-Ahmad changed the number of voting districts in Kuwait from ten (with five MPsper district) to twenty-five (with two representatives each). Most of the new districtswere the outlying badu settlement areas that had been established after the original tendistricts were drawn in 1963.117 This redistricting guaranteed badu representation inparliament, where the government could then buy their legislative votes. The state’s turnto the badu as key allies against urban opposition forces was made evident during theso-called dıwaniyya movement of 1989. Every Monday for seven weeks, a public gath-ering was held in the private dıwaniyya (majlis) of a member of the defunct parliamentunconstitutionally dissolved in 1986, to discuss the restoration of the constitution. Thegovernment tolerated these gatherings when held in the inner suburbs. But when thefifth meeting was planned at a parliamentarian’s home in Jahra, the National Guard useddirect force against the thousands of attendees. Youssef al-Mubaraki attributes theseextreme measures to the fact that the gathering was in a progovernment stronghold,putting its residents at risk of political contamination.118

However, while the state’s spatial policies to keep the badu segregated was key tomaintaining a political balance between loyal and oppositional forces, the fact thatthe badu were not only spatially isolated but also socially excluded through inferiorbenefits and services made it difficult to maintain their long-term loyalty. According toGhabra, as younger generations of badu became better educated, they realized they hadbeen serving the needs of the political system at the expense of their own needs andrights, and therefore remained socially weaker than, despite the fact that were startingto outnumber, the h. ad. ar.119 As Kuwaiti writer Mohammed al-Jassim put it in 2006:“The h. ad. ar bemoan that ‘we have become the minority,’ while the badu say ‘we are theoppressed majority.’”120

In 2006, a youth-based campaign to curb electoral corruption and vote buying suc-cessfully led to the reduction of electoral districts from twenty-five to five. With tenrepresentatives now elected per district and with the fourth and fifth districts constitutingthe predominantly badu “outlying areas,” tribal representation in parliament increasedin the May 2008 elections, with the qaba�il winning twenty-three out of the fifty seats.121

The fourth and fifth districts contained 38 percent of the national population (with morethan half a million citizens in the fifth alone), and 54 percent of registered voters in2008.122 The fact that the tribal deputies now represented such sizeable populationsmade it difficult for the government to buy them out, as MPs began listening to theirconstituencies instead.123 This resulted in numerous interpellations of cabinet ministers(popularly known as grillings) by tribal MPs; in 2007, for instance, Minister of HealthMa�suma al-Mubarak was grilled for a fire that broke out in Jahra’s only hospital, killingtwo patients.

Whereas Longva’s h. ad. ar informants criticized the badu for their “purported blindobedience toward the power holders” and claimed that “a critical attitude toward thegovernment” was an important h. ad. ar attribute,124 today the tribes (aligned with theIslamists) have become the principal opposition to the government. A full exploration ofthe current political standoff between the government and the tribal-Islamic oppositionis beyond the scope of this article, but it is important to identify the conflict’s impact onthe h. ad. ar/badu dichotomy. Though most tribal opposition leaders, such as Musallamal-Barrak (the most prominent and contentious current challenger to the Al Sabah),

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 25

do not explicitly articulate badu inequalities as part of their political agenda, decadesof exclusion, marginalization, and inequality help explain why their badu constituentssupport them. But this is something that many h. ad. ar find difficult to grasp. A 2009blog post entitled “Kuwait is not just for the badu,” by a young h. ad. ar man under thepseudonym “Frankom,” is a case in point.125 The post was in response to a controversyover an accidental fire in a wedding hall in Jahra that killed two people. When residentsdemanded that someone from government be held accountable, as the hall had nofire extinguishers and emergency rescue services took too long to arrive on the scene,the district’s MP immediately called for the grilling of the minister of health. Frankomcharacterized such reactions as “racist” and “divisive” on the part of the badu; he claimedthat hundreds of accidents happened every day in Kuwait, but only “when somethinghappens to them over there” do the badu react “like they are God’s chosen people.” Byinterpreting their reactions to the fire (which occurred a year after the Jahra hospitalfire) as a sign of self-importance, Frankom failed to critically grasp why residents of aneglected and underprivileged area like Jahra might react politically to such an accident.

The recent political empowerment of the tribes has increased h. ad. ar perceptions of thebadu as newcomers and an encroaching threat. As one commentator wrote on Frankom’sblog post:

[W]henever I watch old TV shows . . . or see pictures of old Kuwait . . . or the names of formerparliament members . . . I wonder, where were these people who now cause all the problems inthe city and in parliament? . . . The families of [Kuwait Town] are known, the families of Jahraare known, the families of Fahaheel are known, and that was all of Kuwait. So did these othersjust pop out of the desert from nothing, like truffles?

As already mentioned, a similar statement was made by parliamentary candidateMohammed al-Juwaihel in 2009 when he said that only families who lived inside the townwall and in the villages before oil are real Kuwaitis. A year later al-Juwaihel was beatenunconscious at a political rally by tribal followers of his political adversary al-Barrak.126

This did not deter him from verbally insulting another candidate, Obayd al-Wasmi, andhis Mutair tribe in campaign speeches during the February 2012 parliamentary elections,leading to the burning down of al-Juwaihel’s campaign tent by Mutairi tribesmen.127

That al-Juwaihel was one of only a few nontribal and non-Islamist candidates to beelected to the February 2012 parliament signifies that many Kuwaitis agree with his“aggressively intolerant rhetoric.”128

And yet, though h. ad. ar rhetoric branding the badu as a threat to Kuwaiti socialand political culture remains alive and well, there are signs that it is becoming lesspalatable. One example is the public outcry against Shaykha Fariha al-Sabah, the amir’ssister, in January 2013. Over the previous two months, thousands of demonstrators of allbackgrounds had been protesting the amir’s controversial November decree that reducedthe number of votes per citizen from four to one. Shayhka Fariha described the protestorsas lafu (a derogatory slang word for newly naturalized citizens) and “not Kuwaiti.” Theuproar in the press and social media, from h. ad. ar and badu alike, was considerable.Large numbers of citizens flocked to their local police stations, including in some ofthe inner suburbs such as Nuzha and Faiha, to file official complaints against her. Herstatements were described as uneducated, insulting to the Kuwaiti people, and harmfulto the social fabric, particularly coming from an Al Sabah.129

26 Farah Al-Nakib

C O N C L U S I O N

In 2007 Frankom wrote that: “Kuwait is h. ad. ar and badu . . . Kuwait is for all of us.”Though seemingly inclusive, this sentiment actually recognizes the existence of theseas mutually exclusive groups; in fact, he also wrote that people who say there are nodifferences between h. ad. ar and badu in Kuwait should wake up to reality. But sincethe escalation of political tensions in more recent years, and perhaps in response to theheightened anti-badu polemics expressed by people like al-Juwaihel and Shaykha Fariha,a new discourse is slowly emerging among younger figures on both sides. It is becomingmore common in social media to hear sentiments like those expressed by the journalist�Abd al-Muhsin al-Mishari in July 2012, in which he appealed to his fellow Kuwaitisto stand together for the sake of the country’s future: “No majority or minority, noh. ad. ar or badu, no Sunni or Shi�i. We are all Kuwaitis fighting against disorder.”130 Thisnewly emerging though still nascent discourse that seeks to eliminate the h. ad. ar/badudichotomy—a dichotomy with little analytical validity in Kuwait today given that mosth. ad. ar have tribal lineage and all badu are now urbanized—has arguably come aboutprecisely because the badu have become such a vocal and visible opposition force.Once the badu stopped engaging in “obsequious hand kissing” of the power-holders, asLongva put it, the h. ad. ar not only had to contend with the badu infringing on their historicstatus as Kuwait’s leading political opposition.131 They also have had to come to termswith the fact that those still labeled as “badu” now constitute the demographic majorityand can no longer be marginalized. In a 2010 article unpacking h. ad. ar/badu relations,journalist Ahmad al-Mudaf called for a reconceptualization of Kuwaiti citizenship to bemore inclusive for all members of society, but without erasing the differences that existbetween them. He suggested a heterogeneous but shared Kuwaiti nationality throughwhich markers of difference—which are neither erased nor excluded but retained assub-identities—become less antagonistic.132

The objective of this article has been to build on Longva’s analysis of the h. ad. ar/badudichotomy by filling in the historical gap to reveal the various factors that have con-tributed to its persistence—especially naturalization, housing, and electoral policiesimplemented in the first three decades of oil. Furthermore, analyzing developments inh. ad. ar/badu relations over the eight years since her article was published is necessarynot only to understand how and why the badu have become so oppositional today, butalso to highlight the subtle changes emerging in the discourse that have the potential tofinally eliminate this contentious dichotomy.

N OT E S

1Madawi Al-Rasheed, Politics in an Arabian Oasis (London: I. B. Tauris, 1997), 117.2Ibid., 117, 17.3These were mainly the �Awazim, Rashaidah, and parts of the Mutair, though tribes like the �Ajman,

Bani Hajir, Bani Khalid, and Shammar that roamed the deserts between Kuwait, Najd, and Iraq sometimesproclaimed loyalty to Kuwait’s rulers. J.G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia,vol. 2 (London: Archive Editions, 1986), 1051–52, 1028–29.

4Ibid., 461.5Zahra Freeth, A New Look at Kuwait (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), 170–71.6Anh Nga Longva, “Nationalism in Pre-Modern Guise: The Discourse on Hadhar and Badu in Kuwait,”

International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (2006): 171.

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 27

7Ibid., 184.8Ibid., 172.9Mounira Charrad, “Central and Local Patrimonialism: State-Building in Kin-Based Societies,” The

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 636 (2011): 50.10Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995), 83.11Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value,” in Critical Sociology: European Perspectives,

ed. J. W. Freiberg (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1979), 288.12Ibid.13Al-Rasheed, Politics, 16.14J. R. Povah, Gazetteer of Arabia (Calcutta: Government of India, 1887), 44.15Saif al-Shamlan, Pearling in the Arabian Gulf: A Personal Memoir, trans. Peter Clark (London: The

London Centre of Arab Studies, 2001), 108.16“Administration Report of the Kuwait Political Agency (1929),” in Persian Gulf Administration Reports,

vol. IX (Cambridge: Archive Editions, 1989), 63.17J. C. More (Political Agent, Kuwait) to Sir Percy Cox (High Commissioner, Baghdad), 20 May 1920,

R/15/5/99, India Office Records (hereafter IOR), London.18J. C. More, “The Ikhwan Attack on Jahrah,” 19 October 1920, R/15/5/105, IOR, London.19C. Stanley G. Mylrea, Kuwait before Oil (unpublished memoirs 1945–1951, Middle East Centre Archive,

St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford), 86–87.20“Al-Sur al-Thalith Unshudat �Umrha 90 �Aman Tahki Ramz al-Talahum al-Watani bayn al-

Kuwaytiyyin,” Kuwait News Agency, 21 February 2009.21Yacoub al-Ghunaim, The Wall of Kuwait (Kuwait: Centre for Research and Studies on Kuwait, 2008),

10.22Ibid., 10, 18.23More to Cox, 2 June 1920; Cox to More, 4 June 1920; More to Cox, 6 June 1920; More to Cox, 13 June

1920, R/15/5/99, IOR, London.24Military Report and Route Book, 54, R/15/5/378, IOR, London.25Mylrea, Kuwait before Oil, 89–90.26More to Salem al-Sabah, 19 October 1920; More to Salem al-Sabah, 25 October 1920; Salem al-Sabah

to More, 26 October 1920, R/15/5/105, IOR, London.27Al-Shamlan, Pearling, 59.28J. Calderwood, “Fifty Years on from Kuwait’s Birth, Arguments Still Rage Over Who Is Kuwaiti,” The

National, 23 February 2011.29Lewis Pelly, Report on a Journey to Riyadh in Central Arabia (Cambridge: Oldeander, 1865), 10.30Decree of Law No. 2 regarding Kuwait nationality, 15 December 1948, FO/371/98444, Foreign Office

Records, London.31Kuwait Ministry of Planning, Annual Statistical Abstract, 1966, 27.32Law 15 of 1959: Kuwait Nationality Law, Article 1.33Maureen Lynch and Patrick Barbieri, “Kuwait: State of Exclusion,” Refugees International, 5 July

2007.34Aziz Abu-Hamad, “The Bedoons of Kuwait: Citizens without Citizenship,” Human Rights Watch,

August 1995.35Crystal, Oil and Politics, 88.36In 1994, this was reduced to twenty years. See Mai al-Nakib, “Outside in the Nation Machine: The Case

of Kuwait,” Strategies 13 (2000): 202.37Zahra Freeth, Kuwait Was My Home (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), 95.38Longva, “Nationalism,” 176.39Ahmad al-Khatib, al-Kuwayt: Min al-Imara ila al-Dawla, Dhikrayat al-�Amal al-Watani wa-l-Qawmi

(Beirut: al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-�Arabi, 2007), 188–89.40Crystal, Oil and Politics, 81.41Ibid., 88–89.42Longva, “Nationalism,” 173.43Ibid., 172.44Crystal, Oil and Politics, 88–89.

28 Farah Al-Nakib

45Mary Ann Tetreault, Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait (New York:Columbia University Press, 2000), 46.

46Abdullah Alhajeri, “Citizenship and Political Participation in the State of Kuwait: The Case of theNational Assembly (1963–1996)” (PhD diss., Durham University, 2004), 90–92.

47Shafiq Ghabra, “al-Tamasuk al-Ijtima�i fi al-Kuwayt,” in al-Khalij wa-l-Rabi� al-�Arabi (Kuwait: Markazal-Misbar li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Buhuth, 2012), 8.

48Anh Nga Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion, and Society in Kuwait (Boulder, Colo.:Westview Press, 1997), 48.

49Ali Madanipour, “Social Exclusion and Space,” in City Reader, 4th ed., ed. Richard T. LeGates andFrederic Stout (London: Routledge, 2007), 162.

50Ibid.51Longva, “Nationalism,” 181.52Minoprio & Spencely and P.W. Macfarlane, “Plan for the Town of Kuwait” (November 1951), 16.53Central Bank of Kuwait, The Kuwaiti Economy in Ten Years: Economic Report for the Period 1969–1979

(Kuwait: Central Bank, 1979), 59.54Saba George Shiber, The Kuwait Urbanization (Kuwait: n.p., 1964), 93.55Colin Buchanan and Partners (hereafter CBP), Studies for a National Physical Plan for the State of

Kuwait and Master Plan for the Urban Areas (hereafter Master Plan), “Technical Note OA 24: Housing: TheNon-Bedouin Sector” (September 1970), 7.

56CBP, Master Plan, “Technical Paper 18: Housing in Kuwait” (October 1969), 25.57Rula Sadik, “Nation-Building and Housing Policy: A Comparative Analysis of Urban Housing Devel-

opment in Kuwait, Jordan, and Lebanon” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996), 240.58Freeth, New Look, 175.59CBP, Master Plan, “Technical Note OA 3: Shanties” (June 1970), 1–3.60Ibid., 4.61They based their estimate as follows: in 1965 51,000 shanty dwellers were Kuwaitis. The 3 percent

natural population growth per year should have brought this number to 57,600 by 1970. In addition, 36,000Kuwaitis had moved out of shanties during that period to permanent dwellings, meaning that by 1970 theKuwaiti population should have been 21,600 if 1965 conditions had remained constant. However, by 1970 theKuwaiti population of the shanties was 92,000; thus 70,400 of these were new arrivals. CBP, “Shanties,” 4.

62Freeth, New Look, 143.63Ibid., 175.64Khalil Mahmud, “al-Wasma,” al-Risala, 12 June 1963.65Barges Humud al-Barges, A Twenty-Five Year Era of Kuwait’s Modern Advancement: On the Occasion

of the Silver Jubilee of the National Day on February 25, 1986 (Kuwait: Kuwait News Agency Informationand Research Department, 1986), 22.

66Shiber, Kuwait Urbanization, 227.67Jamil al-Bajuri, “al-Mawta bi-la Qubur,” al-Nahda, 30 January 1971.68The phrase tah. d. ır al-badu used to describe these schemes in government documents is a misnomer,

as in reality the badu living in the shanties were already settled, but were being shifted to more permanentsettlements. CBP, “Housing in Kuwait,” 40.

69Al-Bajuri, “al-Mawta bi-la Qubur.”70CBP, Master Plan, “Technical Note OA 18: New Housing: The Bedouin Sector” (August 1970), 4.71Amir abu al-Sa�ud, “Hadafna laysa Naql al-Khidamat ila al-�Ishish wa-lakin Naql al-Sukkan ila Manatiq

Sakaniyya,” al-Siyasa, 12 December 1976.72Freeth, New Look, 147.73Ibid., 174.74Al-Bajuri, “al-Mawta bi-la Qubur”; Alan Cartwright, “Kuwait Creates a Suburbia,” Middle East Con-

struction 5, no. 12 (1980): 47–49.75“Mushkilat al-�Ishish �Umrha 40 Sana Nasha�at Natijat al-Tatawwur al-Sari�,” al-Ra�i al-�Amm, 12 May

1978.76“Tarhil al-�Ishish . . . li-Madha?,” al-Siyasa, 15 May 1978.77“Alladhin Ya�ishun fi Buyut al-Sha�ar, Wasat al-Harara wa-l-Tauz,” al-Siyasa, 1 July 1979.78Ibid.79“Wa-�Adat al-�Ishish Marra Ukhra fi al-Jahra . . . wa-la �Ilaj,” al-Anba�, 6 December 1982.

Revisiting H. ad. ar and Badu in Kuwait 29

80Al-Sa�ud, “Hadafna.”81“Ila alladhin Yankurun al-Faqr fi al-Kuwayt,” al-Tali�a, 18 August 1965.82CBP, “Bedouin Sector,” 4.83“Al-Shadda allati Ta�ishuha Sukkan �Ishish al-Shdadiyya Mata Tazul?,” al-Siyasa, 13 June 1976.84Ibid.85“Buyut Dhuwi al-Dakhl al-Mahdud,” al-Tali�a, 6 March 1971.86CBP, “Bedouin Sector,” 11.87“Buyut.”88Ibid.89CBP, “Bedouin Sector,” 4.90Longa, “Nationalism,” 176.91Mahmud, “al-Wasma.”92Longva, “Nationalism,” 176.93Ibid., 175.94Shiber, Kuwait Urbanization, 227.95Sven Jensen, “Competition for Township at Sulaibikhat, Kuwait,” ARUP Journal 12, 3 (September

1977); Jim Antoniou, “New Town at Jahra,” Middle East Construction 4, no. 6 (1979).96“�Asr al-�Ishish Yihal �ala al-Taqa�ud,” Ajyal, 25 March 1979.97Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Malden: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2007),

137.98“Mushkilat al-�Ishish.”99CBP, “Non-Bedouin Sector,” 24, 7.

100Al-Bajuri, “al-Mawta bi-la Qubur.”101CBP, “Housing in Kuwait,” 15.102“Ila alladhin Yankurun.”103Ibid.104“Buyut.”105Ibid.106“Al-Shadda.”107Abdulrasool al-Moosa, “Kuwait: Changing Environment in a Geographical Perspective,” British Society

for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin 11 (1984): 56.108“Buyut.”109Al-Moosa, “Kuwait,” 52.110Sa�ud al-Rashid, “al-Masakin al-Sha�biyya,” al-Tali�a, 12 June 1985.111“Ila alladhin Yankurun.”112“Alladhin Ya�ishun.”113Muhammad Ra�if Badawi, “al-�Iqayla Ta�ish �Asr ma qabl al-Naft,” al-Ra�i al-�Amm, 23 July 1979.114Ibid.115Sadik, “Nation-Building,” 262–63.116Sharq, directed by Erik Sandoval (Kuwait: 2007), http://vimeo.com/6785595 (accessed 25 May

2013).117Alhajery, “Citizenship,” 98–102.118Yusuf Mubarak al-Mubaraki, Hina Istia�ada al-Sha�b al-Kuwayti Dusturahu: Waqa�i� wa-Watha�iq

Dawawin al-Ithnayn 1990–1986 (Kuwait: Kuwait National Bookshop, 2008), 89.119Ghabra, “al-Tamasuk al-Ijtima�i,” 7.120Muhammad �Abd al-Qadir al-Jasim, “Hadar wa-Badu wa-Shi�a wa-Shuyukh Aydan,” Mizan, 22 April

2006, http://www.aljasem.org/default.asp?opt=2&art_id=123,121Jamie Etheridge, “Kuwaiti Tribes Turn Parliament to Own Advantage,” Financial Times, 2 February

2009.122Kuwait Ministry of Interior, Elections Electronic Services, http://eservices1.moi.gov.kw/elections/

mainmenu.nsf (accessed 25 May 2013).123Etheridge, “Kuwaiti Tribes.”124Longva, “Nationalism,” 173.125Frankom, “Kuwayt laysat li-l-Badu Faqat,” 27 February 2009, http://www.frankom.com.126Calderwood, “Fifty Years.”

30 Farah Al-Nakib

127B. Izzak and Abdellatif Sharaa, “Enraged Tribesmen Torch Juwaihel’s Election Tent,” Kuwait Times,31 January 2012.

128Hussein Ibish, “Kuwait’s Troubling Elections,” Now Lebanon, 7 February 2012.129“Istinkar Wasi� li-Tasrihatiha,” al-�An, 17 January 2013.130�Abd al-Muhsin al-Mishari, “Ya Sha�b al-Kuwayt Tarabbayna �ala al-Dimuqratiyya,” al-Anba�, 22 July

2012.131Longva, “Nationalism,” 173.132Ahmad al-Mudaf, “Fi al-Kuwayt la Yujad Badu . . . Kulluna Hadar,” al-�An, 4 November 2010.