The New Arab Social Order

A Study Of The Social Impact Of Oil Wealth

Saad E Ibrahim, Saad E. Ibrahim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367294304
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000303827
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The skyrocketing Arab oil revenues of the 1970s have triggered tremendous socioeconomic forces in the Arab world. Observers have extensively studied the financial and geopolitical aspects of Arab oil, but generally have ignored the human and social repercussions stimulated by the oil wealth. This book challenges the commonly accepted view of the im

1
Introduction

Social orders reproduce themselves with every new generation. But with each reproduction, varying degrees of alteration or even mutation take place. The Arab social order is no exception. Since the traumatic rediscovery of the West by the Arabs at the end of the eighteenth century and the subsequent Western penetration into the Arab homeland, four big waves of social change have left their deep impacts on the Arab social structure. The colonial experience, modern science and technology, the national struggle for emancipation, and oil are the hallmarks of the four tidal waves and their chain-reaction effects in the transformation of Arab society.¹ Every Arab generation since the 1800s has experienced the collapse of one or more aspects of the premodern social order and the gestation, difficult labor, and occasional Cesarian birth of a new one. There have been many false pregnancies and several miscarriages. But through it all, the old structures never disappeared; they lay there, albeit in a crumpled or twisted form, but have continued to coexist with new or with caricatures of modern structures. The continuous interplay between elements of the old and the new has given the Arab World a permanent state of “transition” for the last two centuries. Every generation believed it was the bearer of the burdens of “transition,” and occasionally felt trapped or victimized by it.

The Arab social order in the 1980s is a product of previous orders intersecting with regional and global events of the last two decades. The symbolic point of its emergence may date back to the Arab defeat of 1967, to the death of Nasser in 1970, or to the Arab sense of “triumph” in their fourth war with Israel in 1973.² But whatever the hypothetical conception point of the new order, oil has been its underlying factor. As a salient substructural force, oil has not only altered the global reaction between the Arabs and the rest of the world, but has also triggered manifest as well as latent forces of change in the inter-Arab equation, within each Arab society, and inside most men and women of the Arab World. To be sure, oil had been affecting the social landscape in a score of producing countries for the previous three decades. But it is in the last ten years that the oil-related social changes have been phenomenally accelerated within those countries and have spilled over dramatically into neighboring countries. In this sense, it is justified to speak of one Arab social order; the chain of causation begins in some countries and ends up in others, and vice versa.

It would be an oversimplification to attribute all features of the new Arab social order to oil. But it is not an exaggeration to contend that oil is the most important single factor in giving this order its unique characteristics. In this sense, we submit that oil in its own right has triggered as many qualitative and quantitative changes as each of the three previous waves: colonialism, introduction of science and technology, and national struggle for liberation.

The new Arab social order we propose to analyze here is still emerging; it is in a continuous state of flux. Thus the word “order” should not imply “orderly,” “congruency,” or “harmony.” If anything, early indications point to marked tension, conflict, and inconsistencies in the new Arab social order. It is an “order,” nevertheless, insofar as its elements are linked to and affect one another. This new order may be held together by fear or trust, love or hate, national unifiers or subcultural diversifiers; or by a combination of all. But it is held together by constant internal motion even if it seems to outsiders to be immobile.

When we assert that oil has been a major determinant of the new social order it should of course be realized that we are talking not simply about oil as a “raw material.” It is all the facets of this strategic substance; i.e., as energy source, technology, money, geopolitics, and manpower. The interaction among all these facets on one hand, and the existing social structures on the other, has produced a host of social-cultural changes that we are subsuming under the label “new order.” It includes the emergence of new social formations (e.g., classes, status groups), new demographic allocations and dislocations, new values and normative systems, new behavioral patterns, and new lines of conflict.

Like all societal configurations, the new Arab social order has its images—outward manifestations of substructural dynamics. We start, in Chapter 2, with some of these images: then we trace them back to the major social forces at work in contemporary Arab society. Three of these images (the mechanized nomad, the lumpen capitalist-entrepreneur, and the “kafil”) are from the oil-rich Arab countries. Three others (the Egyptian peasant in Arabia, the veiled medical student, and the angry Muslim militant) are primarily from non-oil countries. All six images exist everywhere in the Arab World; but some are more pronounced in oil countries and some are more preponderant in non-oil countries. The major societal dynamics to which these images and other new sociocultural products are traceable may be summed up in one phrase: movement of manpower and money across country borders caused by oil. The volume and pattern of this movement are analyzed in Chapter 3.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia will be our focal points of reference. They epitomize the salient features of the new Arab social order. One, Egypt, is overpopulated, poor, with surplus labor, a tremendous capacity to absorb capital of which there is very little, and with fairly well-developed manpower and social institutions. The other, Saudi Arabia, is under-populated, with labor shortage, limited capacity to absorb capital of which there is plenty, and with underdeveloped manpower and only the embryonic genesis of modern institutions. The two countries in many ways represent opposite ends of one bipolar social order in the Arab World at present. In Chapters 4 and 5 we discuss the causes and consequences of labor exportation from Egypt and labor importation to Saudi Arabia, respectively.

The Arab World has had several revolutions in this century. Some have been loud with sounds and fury. Others have been silent. Loud or silent, a revolution is primarily defined by its impact. Oil and movement of manpower and money across country lines is one of the Arab World’s silent revolutions. Its impact is the birth of a new Arab social order. A major feature of that order is a new stratification system among the Arab states and within each state. The novel phenomenon of a “country-class” in the Arab World is discussed in Chapter 6. The new inter-Arab stratification system has, in turn, generated new links and interdependence among the poor, the middle, the rich, and the super-rich Arab states. Such links, we argue in Chapter 6, give the Arab World a level of socioeconomic unity unprecedented since the zenith of the Arab-Islamic Empire of the eighth century A.D. But the quality of this unity is a far cry from what Arab Nationalists have dreamt of in this twentieth century.

In the final chapter, Chapter 7, we discuss some of the political bottlenecks in the new Arab order. We argue that the phenomenal growth of oil wealth has not been accompanied by structural socioeconomic-political development. Inter-Arab and intra-Arab inequalities, as well as growing dependence relations with more advanced countries, especially in the West, are generating tremendous tension in the new Arab order.

2
Images of the New Social Order

Arab society has known three major modes of living: desert, countryside, and town. One way of gauging social change is to monitor over time what happens in each of these three modes of living. The six images of change we sketch below cover the spectrum of Arab human ecology. The first image, the mechanized Bedouin, is central to the present-day desert mode of living. The two images of lumpen capitalists, as well as the veiled medical student and the angry Muslim militant, are typically urban images. The Egyptian peasant outside the Nile Valley is an outgrowth of the rural mode of living.

Each of the six images is symptomatic of structural changes in Arab society. A change is defined here as “structural” if it entails qualitative rather than merely quantitative alteration in values, norms, attitudes, relations, or behavioral patterns.¹

The Mechanized Bedouin

Nomadism is one of the oldest life-styles in the Arab World.² The fact that over 80 percent of the area is desert, arid, and with very little rainfall gave rise to nomadic pastoral life for a segment of Arab population—the Bedouins. All the country states of the Arab World have a Bedouin component in their population. But it is in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, southwestern Iraq, the Syrian desert, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia that Bedouin population exceeds 10 percent of the total. The 1977 Saudi census estimates their number at about 1.9 million or 25 percent of the kingdom’s total official population.

The main social organization of the Bedouins is made up of the tribe (kabila) and its subsegments (cashirah, batn, and fakhz). Their habitat is the desert, their shelter is animal-hair tents, and their means of sustenance are camel or sheep herds. Their value system emphasizes primordial loyalty to the kinship group, communalism, courage, and hospitality. In sum, the traditional image of the nomadic Bedouin for the last few millenia has been a tent, a herd, a horse, a sword, a primordial value system, and constant roaming in the desert. This combination of elements made for a successful system of adaptation to a harsh environment. It also set the Bedouin life-style aside in sharp distinction from the two sedentary life-styles of Arab society, the rural and the urban.

This nomadic life-style, which had resisted any marked alteration for thousands of years, is now undergoing major changes. In the early days of oil exploration in the late 1930s, Bedouins began to work first as guides for American oil companies and then as unskilled laborers. Some of them were trained to drive and maintain trucks. Some began to purchase secondhand pickup trucks from the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMC0).³ It was a new status symbol for the few during the 1950s and 1960s. But in the last ten years the truck and other types of motor vehicles have become a “tent-hold” item. Now they are the functional equivalent of baggage camels and horses. Trucks are used to haul water, to transport flocks of sheep from one grazing site to another, and to oversee camel herding over a wide expanse of desert.

The motor vehicle has had a tremendous effect on the life of the Bedouins. It has opened up new cultural and economic vistas to the nomads. Now they go to cities more often; they listen to the radio all the time while roaming the desert; and they deal with car agents, mechanics, electricians, and gasoline dealers.

The increasing use of trucks in the desert has been accompanied by other equally dramatic changes in the infrastructure basic to the exploitation of the desert. Both government and oil companies developed underground water resources by drilling deep wells. As a result, the nomad’s patterns of grazing and time cycles have markedly changed. Now they can stay longer, especially in the summer, in one site close to waterheads. They have also learned to share water sources with other tribes, since the wells are not tribally dug or owned. These two developments have inspired the government to offer the nomads educational, social, and health services during the summer season. The services delivery program is known as the Summer Campaign and has expanded steadily since 1977 to cover the entire kingdom. The government is planting, and in fact building into the Summer Campaigns, the seeds of sedentarization of the Saudi Bedouins. The location of the school, the mosque, and the clinic around a deep water well gives the nomadic tribes a point of reference and an incentive to settle. Other enticements are constantly offered.⁴

Underlying the interest of the government in settling the nomads is the serious shortage of manpower in Saudi Arabia—a problem that is discussed in more than one place in this volume. The Saudi nomadic Bedouins and the Saudi women are the two major untapped sources of badly needed indigenous manpower. While it may be quite a time before the puritanical Saudi mores allow the tapping of womanpower, the nomads are readily accessible.

Efforts to incorporate nomads into modern sectors of the Saudi society have succeeded in only two areas: working in the oil fields and enlisting in the Saudi National Guard.⁵ In both cases, however, the individual Bedouin remains strongly committed to his tribe and to its nomadic life-style. He shuttles back and forth between the two subcultures for some years, then often gets married, retires from the modern sector, and settles back into the nomadic life-style along with the rest of his clan or tribe. Of course, some may opt for permanent sedentary life, but this is still the exception.

Reverting back to a nomadic life-style, however, is not going back to traditional nomadism. The tent, the camel, the sheep, the horse, and the sword are all still there. But cascading over them are the truck, the radio, and the machine gun. The Bedouins still move around the vast Arabian desert. But they linger longer at each site; and when they decide to move from one site to another it is now much faster. The herd is still the Bedouins’ major economic base—for milk, meat, hair, transport, and as a medium of exchange. But now it is supplemented by cash money from wages and salaries obtained from working in the oil fields or as national guardsmen. The traditional Bedouin diet of milk, dates, and meat has been supplemented by Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice and canned food.

Oil and the wealth spilling over from it have affected the Bedouins in still another way. Camels are now bred as luxury and sport items. The Royal Family and the Saudi upper stratum have gone heavily into camel racing in recent years. The Bedouins have, in turn, made a sizeable profit from the new sport. A good race camel may sell for as much as $15,000.

The Saudi Bedouins, like other groups in the Arab World, have been touched deeply by oil and its chain effects. We noted here some of the obvious consequences. No doubt there are other consequences that remain latent. Also, like other groups, the Bedouins are silently struggling to preserve a way of life in the face of new technologies, new modes of production, and new economic forces. In this dialectical interplay, the outcome evolves as a synthesis of sorts. Thus modern technology, symbolized by the motor vehicle, is used to preserve a traditional way of life: herding and roaming the desert. Likewise, a traditional means of sustenance, the camel, has turned from an imperative for survival into a means of luxury sport. Cash provides a link between the desert grazing sites and the city’s modern sports arena.

In his reaction to modern occupations, the Bedouin again has been selective. When asked by this researcher about which occupations they would like to see their children engaged in (other than herding), the majority picked military ones—with air force pilots at the top of the list. Commanding things or people appeals to the Bedouins. We suspect that their choice is not without relevance to their traditional value system. If courage, chivalry, and constant moving are part of the Bedouins’ normative system, then commanding an air force supersonic fighter seems to come very close. Commanding a tank, an armored vehicle, or a truck, still reflects the same normative system. Little wonder, therefore, that most of the Bedouins who opted for modern occupations ended up in the Saudi Army, National Guard, or as truck drivers. In this sense, the Bedouins have avoided the sharp dichotomous choices which may otherwise negate one another. Phrased differently, the Bedouins have picked from the arsenal of modernity those items that could be wed to, or even enhance, their traditions. This is not to suggest that such synthesis has always been smooth or without its share of strain. There are signs of increased divorce, alcoholism, and drug use among the younger generation of Bedouins who shuttle back and forth between the two subcultures. There is also a growing restlessness and defiance of traditional authority. But all of these signs are still too limited in scope and frequency to draw any firm conclusions.

Lumpen Capitalists: The Saudi Entrepreneur ⁶

Another image of a changing social order in the Arab World is that of the new Saudi entrepreneur. Most oil countries—mai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Images of the New Social Order
• 3. Inter-Arab Labor Migration
• 4. Causes and Consequences of Labor Exportation: Egypt
• 5. Causes and Consequences of Labor Importation: Saudi Arabia
• 6. Inter-Arab Stratification
• 7. The Challenge
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index