Sarah—Umm Thunayan—said Mugbel was born the year the brooks flooded; the year of the locusts Wasma was talking about had been three years before that. . .If births in Wadi al-Uyoun did not stand out or cause arguments, what really did complicate things that season was the government’s three-man commission sent to record the names of all the males and new births . . .This fear led the people of Wadi al-Uyoun to ·deal warily with the commission: they concealed much information, said nothing about traveling family members, and did not so much as mention their daughters.

–Abdelrahman Munif, in Cities of Salt

I should say at the outset that I am an anarchist, and one in a particular and not very romantic sense of the word, and that this essay is an attempt to explain how I became one much to the consternation of most of my own training and preferences. What essentially convinced me wasn’t theory (although it was later helpful to express it into a vocabulary) but rather I think it was, as with pretty much every way most people arrive at convictions they would rather not hold, through repeatedly running into the same wall in different rooms. The wall, in my case, was the state, and the rooms were the various histories I was reading at the time, and the particular room in which the wall finally became unavoidable was my own (or rather my being a descendant of that wall), the one containing the failed sedentarisation of the Najdi Bedouin between roughly 1912 and 1930, of which I only came across contingently through my PhD archival studies. I want to write about this because I think it explains something I have not seen explained particularly well, and partly because I have a folder of PhD notes I never used and a Sunday with nothing in it. :D

The kind of framework that hopefully thread this all together here is one borrowed from the anthropologist James Scott, and I want to be brief about it because it has been summarised too many times. Seeing Like a State argues that the modern state cannot govern a population it cannot see, that most populations left to their own devices are not in the kind of shape a state can see, and that the state therefore goes on to make them visible through various things like fixing surnames, surveying plots, standardising weights, pruning languages, building cities on grids. Abdelrahman Munif, in Cities of Salt writes about the “the damned questions” that state agents “asked about dialects, about tribes and their dis­putes, about religion and sects, about the routes, the winds and the rainy seasons” which gave the protagonist anxiety about the future of the wadi. “The wadi’s inhabitants…discovered that the three [state agents] knew a lot about religion, the desert, the bedouin’s life and the tribes…[and] moved many people of the wadi to wonder among themselves if these were jinn”.

Scott sympathises with the not-so-heroic resisters who oppose this visiblity-making, ones who do not so much do so in the open but rather by simply avoiding being seen at all. Thus this is the pastoralist who happens to be elsewhere when the census comes through. It is also the the people of Wadi al-Uyoun who give the surveyor a name nobody actually uses. It is moreover the peoples Scott calls Zomia in his later book, who spent two thousand years living in the highlands of southeast Asia for the specific purpose of not being legible to the lowland states beneath them. Clearly, none of these populations are heroes of grand revolution dancing in the halls of the Bastille. The people in question are those who, on the available evidence, simply concluded that being known to a state was on balance worse for them than not being known to it, and who therefore arranged their entire material lives around that conclusion.

My objection to the state is not that it is incompetent at the work of seeing and sorting and settling the people it governs. Such an objection is merely reformist and allows you to keep your faith in administration and merely ask for better administrators. The competent state is even more frightening because it does not issue an order you can possibly refuse. It completely rearranges the ground under your feet until the material life you were living becomes one you can no longer afford and then it calls your departure from that life a choice. The loud, clumsy, order-issuing state is the one historians write about because it leaves around a great deal of wreckage. The ground-shifting state leaves a suburb, and nobody writes the history of a suburb.

Scott uses Brasilia’s urban planning to drive the point - it looked brilliant from this birds eye view but functioned famously atrociously that the 1950s trend of similiar high-modernist urban planning came to be called ‘Brasilia syndrom’ and ‘Helicopter urbanism’

I think that the Arab nomadic pastoralists are, in Scott’s terms, an almost perfect case. Scattered from the Atlas to the Hijaz, they spent the better part of a millennium evading the registers of every empire that claimed them in turn from the Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman to briefly the Europeans, and had done so by the simple expedient of moving (my PhD was on the concept of human mobility in the region but this did not so much figure into it). Their social order was reciprocal and very much tribal, they made their wealth through camels (which the state could not tax without first finding them) and their territorial claims were seasonal rather than permanent. They paid no zakat to anyone they did not personally respect. The Lehnert and Landrock photograph below of a 1910 caravan is quite illustrative to me, of a long file of camels at dusk, perfectly legible as an image but entirely illegible as a unit of administration. The image encapsulates what I try to picture what was about to be lost. If you find these people in the archives, as Scott more or less puts it, something terrible has already happened to them.

A 1910 photo by Lehnert & Landrock showing a camel caravan migration in the desert

What happened to them is what I want to expound upon because it is empirically stranger than the received account typically narrates and also because almost nobody outside the specialist literature seems to know it. The standard narrative is written, in the main, by people broadly sympathetic to the modern state and it holds that nomadic pastoralism was a doomed form of life, that it was economically marginal, ecologically precarious, incompatible with the scale and tempo of the twentieth century, such that its disappearance, however one mourns it in a Romantic sense, was at any rate both inevitable and on balance a mercy. Schools and clinics were opened, and the camel herd gave way to wage labour, and wage labour gave way, in time, to the air-conditioned villa. This is roughly the story most Saudis under fifty have been told about their grandparents. It is also, in the parts that I think matter a great deal, wrong.

It is wrong in a particular way in which slow transformation of material conditions had almost everything to do with the eventual settling of the Bedouin, but the important part is that what the standard account seems to always distort is the shape of the process, which it characterises as slow where it was abrupt, impersonal where it was directed, inevitable where it was contingent, and benign where, for one decisive decade, it was quite a disaster. The early Saudi state, between roughly 1912 and 1930, made a serious and fully resourced attempt to settle the Najdi Bedouin by deliberate administrative top-down design, and failed. Failed catastrophically, and so doing it produced the most destructive non-state actor the peninsula had seen in centuries, i.e., the Ikhwan, whose career occupies most of the rest of this essay.

This history of it goes something like this. Ibn Saud’s project from the 1910s onwards required an army he did not have the population base to recruit. The settled population of Najd was small, fractious and not particularly martial. The nomadic population was several hundred thousand strong and was, on paper, exactly the demographic resource a state-builder needed. The problem was that they were nomads, and the additional and more serious problem was that they were, by the standards of the Wahhabi revivalist movement Ibn Saud had bound himself to, theologically suspect, too casual about prayer, too tolerant of pre-Islamic practices, too inclined to mix Islam with the inherited religious customs of the desert. The two problems were addressed simultaneously and with more or less the same instrument. Mutawwa’ah (religious preachers) were dispatched into the desert to convert the Bedouin to Wahhabi orthodoxy, to teach them that the settled life of the cultivator was the morally superior one, and to organise them into agricultural settlements called hijras, which I think is a deliberate echo of the Prophet’s migration from which it could load the transition from tent to mud-brick house with the entire emotional weight of the founding event of Islam. Several hundred such villages were built. The state subsidised the housing. It financed the wells and compelled through direct pressures as much as through incentive, the sale of the camels that were the material precondition of nomadic autonomy. A population that was essentially mobile, essentially reciprocal and broadly indifferent to the religious and political claims of central authority had, by the early 1920s, been converted into a settled, dependent, intensely religious force called the Ikhwan, the Brethren, distinguishable in the field by the white cloth bands they wore around their heads.

It worked in the short term in more or less the way the planners had intended it to work. The Ikhwan were something like the shock troops of the Saudi conquest of the Hijaz between 1924 and 1925. They were ferocious, disciplined and, by the standards of the day, extremely effective. The state had taken an illegible population and made it legible, and the legible version proved to be pretty useful.

What the state had not anticipated, and what nobody at the time seems to have been able to anticipate, was that the new category it had created, that is, the settled, fundamentalist, state-dependent Ikhwan warrior, would not stay where it had been put. The men who had been made Ikhwan by the sedentarisation project began, within a few years of the conquest, to behave as Ikhwan with a logic of their own. Having sold their camels, they were no longer autonomous and mobile, relying instead on wartime employment as Ikhwan soldiers. They turned the settlements into mosques and refused to farm. They struggled with the processes of modernity and remained largely unproductive and shunned the state’s productive forces of agricultural labour, industry and trade as heretical activities. They declared the radio, the telegraph, the automobile and tobacco to be innovations forbidden by their reading of the faith. They began attacking other Bedouin who had not been similarly converted, on the grounds that those Bedouin were now infidels. By 1927 they had begun raiding into British-protected Iraq against Ibn Saud’s explicit orders, and by 1929 they had launched an open revolt against the Saudi state itself, on the grounds that Ibn Saud, having accepted modern military equipment from the British and resisted further religious purification, had himself become an apostate. The state eventually crushed them, with British-supplied machine guns and aircraft, which is to say with exactly the modern technology the Ikhwan had declared forbidden, at the battle of Sabilla in March 1929. Some of the survivors were absorbed into what became the Saudi National Guard. Others returned to a vastly diminished pastoralism. Most of their descendants would, two generations later, be salaried employees of Aramco, and indeed administrators of the state.

I want to draw two things out of this story. The Ikhwan were a creation of the modernising state. The fanaticism for which they became famous was not what nomadic Najdi religion had looked like before the hijras; it was what nomadic Najdi religion looked like after it had been forcibly settled and rendered economically dependent on a central authority that had also taught it to think of itself as the vanguard of a universal religious truth. The category produced the people. Once produced, the people behaved according to the internal logic of the category and not according to the wishes of those who had produced them. Ian Hacking, in a different context, called this the looping effect. I think it is the single most important phenomenon for anyone who proposes to govern other people to understand, and I think it is the phenomenon that high-modernist state-builders have most consistently failed to understand, and I think the failure is structural because to understand it would be to abandon the project. The Saudi state could not have foreseen the Ikhwan revolt because foreseeing it would have required granting that the population it was acting on was not, in fact, raw material to be moulded and shaped as it wished but a system whose response to being shaped would have its own emergent character beyond the planners’ control. No state has ever consistently granted this. They simply cannot. To grant it is to give up the thing that makes one a state in the first place.

The second thing, and this is the thing that took me longer to be willing to say, is that the failure of the Saudi sedentarisation project was not a special failure. It is what happened, with regional variations, in most of the comparable cases. The Soviet collectivisations, the Tanzanian villagisations, the Israeli pacification of the Negev Bedouin, the various French and British attempts in North Africa and the Levant. The pattern is consistent enough that calling it a pattern feels almost too modest. Large-scale legibility projects aimed at nomadic or otherwise illegible populations do not, in the historical record, produce the outcomes their planners expect. They produce categories that loop, dependent populations that become uncontrollable in new ways, ecological collapses, religious movements that the original administrators would have found unrecognisable. The work of governing eventually gets done but it gets done by other means, via markets, oil revenue, the slow attrition of demography, and what the state directly attempted is, more often than not, the part that visibly went wrong.

I do not want to overstate the position. There are many things states do that I am glad they do, and there are many functions of legibility I would not want to live without. The argument is not that all government is illegitimate, though I have indeed made something close to this argument you will find elsewhere (re anti-civlisation positions). The idea here is merely that the ambition of government, the ambition to take a population that is currently arranged according to its own logics and rearrange it according to a logic legible from the capital, has a track record sufficiently bad, across enough cases, that the burden of proof on any particular instance of it should be considerably higher than current political vocabulary allows. When a state proposes to settle a nomadic population or to consolidate a dispersed one or to standardise a plural one or to bring an illegible community into the registers of the modern administrative apparatus, the appropriate first response is to be historically informed, and take the burden to be one that lies on the state to demonstrate, against the weight of every comparable precedent, that this time will somehow be different. Because it almost never is.

This is what I mean when I say I am an anarchist. I do not mean that I want to abolish the post office! I have read enough of these histories to have lost the faith my education tried to give me in the basic competence of large-scale administrative reason when applied to populations that have not asked to be administered. I am the great-grandson of a man on the ground, writing from a city laid over his grazing routes, producing in this essay a hopefully legible, somewhat scholarly account of the people legibility unmade. A kind of final form of the state’s image.

[WARNING: INTERESTING TANGENT STARTING]

When settlement did come about it eventually instantiated a generation later across the late 1940s through the 1970s oil boom, which gave the state the means to make settled life materially preferable to mobile life in a world now being transformed (destroyed) in all matters by it, and of which it had spent those revenues accordingly towards salaried positions (the new National Guard among them), cash and rations and clinics dispensed from fixed points, and the infrastructure of the oil economy itself such as the Tapline road across the north, whose wells and wage work pulled nomadic families off their routes. This sedenterisation is often talked about in retrospect as voluntary, and in a sense it was, the sense of the word ‘voluntary’ by which nobody marched the Bedouin into the towns, and many in fact pitched their own tents beside the oil camps and went looking for work. But this was voluntary in the way that driving is voluntary in a city that has spent thirty years rebuilding itself around the car. This is rather a feature of techonology more generally, where in this instance, motorised transport initially fulfilled an actual need but gradually introduced a series of regulations, obligations, documents and taxes such that, over time, the flow of traffic constrains human activity in ways that the techonology intially did not foresee, and where motorised transport became mandatory for many people to maintain a semblance of normalcy. At any rate, the truck displaced the camel and destroyed the economics of long-distance carriage that had been the herd’s other livelihood. The demarcation of the new frontiers with Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan cut the migration ranges in half and left wells and winter pasture behind a border post. The oil wage became the one dependable income in a decade when every older income was failing together. By the time a family settled beside the Aramco fence, the alternative it might have settled instead had been made, in the plainest sense, unlivable. This is settlement as a consequence of exclusion and not really the embrace of one good life over another, so calling it ‘voluntary’ is misleading.

It is worth asking why mobility in particular had to be the thing that withered away. Foucualt says (don’t roll your eyes just yet) that productive order reserves a special intolerance for the figure who moves. The vagabond, in his lectures on the punitive society, is a symbol of economic unproductivity, the one “hostile or opposed to the rule of the maximization of production”, the body that cannot be located, scheduled or held to a contract, and the Bedouin was in a sense the Gulf’s vagabond. A population that grazed where the rain had fallen and paid zakat only to men it respected was hard to tax but also harder to make them simply show up. And showing up on time, as industrial wage-labour demanded, was the demand the old life was least able to meet because the old life did not run on the hour at all. Its day was what Evans-Pritchard called the “cattle clock”, a day measured by the daily round of herding tasks, cyclical and never scarce in the way the industrial hour is scarce, since there is always a tomorrow in which to recover what today lost.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes in Tourists and Vagabonds that industrial time, a construct of modernity that disciplines human behaviour by aligning individuals’ actions with the demands of industrial and capitalist systems, and the straight line “in one piece, with equidistant markings”, is the time a shift and a commute take for granted, and the two cannot be run at once. Oil companies necessitated a particular patterning of time and space; one needed to clock in and out at set time, and thus required a journey from home to work that is regulated by this new conception of time and space which could only work by changing one’s lifestyle from mobile to fixed, such that many simply preferred to live at the premises of the oil companies. The demand to settle the Bedouin was therefore not merely about where he slept and that it must be fixed in some urban setting, it moreover was a demand that he change which kind of time he lived in, and material conditions underlying it, including the wage relation, is what made refusing it almost impossible.

The hijra project ordered the Bedouin to become something else, to convert, to farm and obey a religious and territorial authority that had announced in advance what they were to be. A population that has been issued an order can refuse the order as the Ikhwan indeed did. The second project issued no order and convened no committee to abolish the nomad and published no plan for his disappearance. It was, very importantly, the material condition of the mobile life that was made to lapse until remaining mobile became a refusal almost nobody could afford and there was nothing to rise against because nothing had been declared.

[INTERESTING TANGENT OVER]

Addendum-ish

I cannot help but think of the devshirme institution here. For four centuries the Ottoman state levied Christian boys from its subject Balkan provinces, converted them and raised them into the Janissaries, the Sultan’s elite infantry and the most loyal soldiers he had, loyal precisely because they had been manufactured to belong to nothing but him. The Janissaries became a power in their own right, made and unmade sultans, mutinied when reform threatened them, and were finally annihilated by the dynasty that had built them when Mahmud II turned artillery on their barracks in 1826, an event the Ottoman chancery recorded, without apparent irony, as the Auspicious Incident. The Ikhwan brought to life in twenty years the arc the Janissaries took four centuries to complete. It’s somewhat a sadder story still, in that the Ikhwan grew more faithful to the state’s founding creed than the state itself. Ibn Saud had taught them they were the vanguard of a purifying revelation, and they believed it without the Realist reservations a ruler keeps in his back pocket. In the end, orthodoxy had to slaughter the orthodox for the offence of taking orthodoxy at its word. There is a long European phrasebook for this. The Revolution, as Vergniaud is supposed to have said on his way to the scaffold, devours its children; Goya painted Saturn doing the eating. The Ikhwan are the children the Najdi revolution ate, and it ate them for staying revolutionaries after the revolution had decided to become a state.

However, Ibn Saud’s descendants and his lot were themselves a couple of generations before nomads or semi-nomads. There were not, in other words, a state in the sense the Ottoman Empire was an empire-state when the Mamluks or Janissaries were recruited. I think I ought to here return to regional scholars for some generalisations. Ibn Khaldun, writing in fourteenth-century North Africa and watching dynasty after dynasty rise and rot around him, he proposed that history in the Arab world ran on a cycle powered by asabiyya, which is the fierce in-group solidarity that desert life breeds and that urban comfort dissolves. Nomads with high asabiyya take the soft wealthy town, found a dynasty, sink into its luxuries, lose within three or four generations the cohesion that had made them formidable, and are overthrown in turn by the next hungry confederation coming in off the sand. The Bedouin making the state and the state remaking the Bedouin is in one sense, at the largest scale, simply what Ibn Khaldun describes.

In this particular case the Saudi state mutates the cycle. In Ibn Khaldun the nomads supply their own asabiyya and collect their own reward, which is that they become the dynasty. In Najd the machine was run from the outside and in reverse. The state manufactured the solidarity itself, through the mutawwa’ah and the hijras, thus manufacturing an asabiyya fiercer than anything the open desert had produced, since desert religion had been notoriously lax and the engineered version was fanatical. Then, having spent the solidarity on the conquest of the Hijaz, it withheld the one payoff the Khaldunian cycle promises. The Bedouin never got to be the dynasty. They got to be the shock troops, then the rebels, then the dead at Sabilla, and at last, in their grandsons, the salaried staff. The asabiyya was extracted, expended and discarded, and the descendants merely inherited a pension, mostly in the National Guard. Empires have always preferred to garrison their frontiers with the people they have most recently beaten. Rome settled defeated barbarians as foederati to hold the line against the next barbarians; the British officered the Raj with sepoys raised from the populations they had conquered; the colonial states of Africa policed Africans with askaris. It is humiliating and cruel. A subdued people, handed a uniform and a wage and a small stake in the order that defeated them, becomes that order’s most dependable enforcer, because it has the most to lose if the order falls and nowhere else to go. The Bedouin spent a thousand years being the thing the state could not police. Their grandsons became the police.

From the 1959 Danish anthropological expedition to Qatar, in Ferdinand, Klaus. Bedouins of Qatar. Edited by Ida Nicolaisen, Thames & Hudson, 1993.

References

1. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.
2. Cole, Donald P. “Where Have the Bedouin Gone?” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 2, 2003, pp. 235–267. Link
3. Al-Rihani, Amin. Modern History of Najd and Its Appendices. 1928.
4. Nahedh, Moner. The Sedentarization of a Bedouin Community in Saudi Arabia. PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 1984. Link
5. Galaty, John G., and Philip Carl Salzman, editors. Change and Development in Nomadic and Pastoral Societies. Brill, 1981.
6. Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Harvard University Press, 1999.
7. Montigny, Anie. “Bedouins from the Eastern Arabia to the Gulf Ports.” In Nomad Lives, edited by Aline Averbouh, Nejma Goutas, and Sophie Méry, 133–151. Publications scientifiques du Muséum, 2021. Link
8. Mehanni, Benjamin. “Walking the Walk: An Examination of Āl Murrah Bedouin’s Motives for Continued Nomadism.” Honors Thesis, University of South Florida, 2009. Link
9. From the 1959 Danish anthropological expedition to Qatar, in Ferdinand, Klaus. Bedouins of Qatar. Edited by Ida Nicolaisen, Thames & Hudson, 1993.