What Makes a Revolution? On the Irregularities of Desert Arabs

In this text, Ahmad Makia radically decenters the history of the Arab Revolution from the fertile Levant, Egypt, and Iraq to the deserts of the Arab Peninsula. At the core of this alternative history is the Dhofar Revolution against the Omani Sultanate and its Western allies, as immortalized by filmmaker Heiny Srour.

In the contemporary West Asian cultural landscape, there persists a fixation on Arab unity and solidarity. Invoked as a ghost, a missed opportunity, or an unrealized society which needs to be resurrected, the romanticism of Arab solidarity in cultural practices today lingers as an affective myth and as warped insomnia. Auto-theorizing it as “Umm Kulthum Doesn’t Sleep,” or in its less poetic dimension as the “Pan-Arab Hangover,” is a body of work that aims to dislodge modern pan-Arab identity as a locus for solidarity and decolonial practice today. From exploring Arab nationalism’s parent ideology of German romanticism to how it creates non-Arab minority identities, (Kurdish, Amazigh…), the Pan-Arab Hangover provides critical transgressions and new complexities from inherited political histories. 

As an example, some of today’s reflections and inspirations on the histories of revolutionary movements in the region gravitate to Palestine, or mid-century Cairo and Algiers, or Bourghibia’s Tunisia, Gaddafi’s Libya, and Nimeiri’s Sudan. Yet, political movements of the Arabian Peninsula, particularly that of Yemen and Oman, are rarely featured as examples of collective Arab revolutionary history. The same persists in today’s revolutionary movements, where Cairo’s Tahrir Square is celebrated in West Asia; yet Yemeni Houthis are perceived to be in a state of war rather than a revolution. The reason isn’t social or political. Arguably, it is environmental. “Arabia” proper, or the Arabian Peninsula, is best known as a desert in the broader West Asian imaginary, and thereby conceived of as a space of negation, loss, and dissociation, as if a “cultural desert” or a vacuum.

Moreover, when thinkers refer to revolutionary histories of the region, the “region” in itself is overwhelmingly concentrated around the contours of the Fertile Crescent or the Mashriq: Egypt, Iraq, and the Levant; nations that also became a short-lived United Arab Republic. The Pan-Arabist revolution, part of the larger Tricontinental and non-Aligned zeitgeist, was mostly a media and narrative revolution which created the autogenetic Arab. The vision of the autogenetic Arab identity was pluralist and positivist, in which Arabness was considered a self-chosen and declared identity, rather than genetically bound. It identified those who speak Arabic and belong to a shared sense of Arabic culture. It spurred them to recall the glories and riches they experienced during the Islamic Golden Age and in the flourishing ancient cities of Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. Indeed, much of pan-Arabist thinking enticed those considered subjugated individuals of a waning Ottoman and Islamic Empire to mobilize themselves against a menacing European dominance. Thinkers and engineers of the modern and postcolonial Arabic identity rehashed Islamic imperial heritage as a way to empower a new generation of self-determined, secular, and unified Arabs. 

Even though the Pan-Arabist movement considered its politics as far-reaching, the contemporary audience, which shares it as a collective history, endures in the Fertile Crescent region.

Apart from being appended in military history of the Middle East and in official colonial records, very few interpretations, analysis, and cultural work offer complex exploration of the Arabian Peninsula’s anti-colonial events and histories. Yet, practices and sites of revolution in the Arabian Peninsula provide important contributions to forms of political resistance towards neoliberal extractive capitalism, namely crude oil. 

There too exists strong connections between the modernization experience of the Peninsula and anti-colonial, pro-Arabist histories of the broader West Asian region. As news grew that the desert Peninsula states were being surveyed by Western nations for oil resources, the newly minted pan-Arab petty bourgeoisie began to migrate and take up employment in the clerical and industrial ranks of emerging hydrocarbon Peninsula cities. Some of these families had migrated from their own postcolonial territories, feeling robbed or betrayed by similar Western extractive cultures, which were operating in the Peninsula in addition to the trauma felt by the Palestinian nakba and establishment of Israel. Naturally, many migrant workers were anti-Western and this sentiment translated widely in the Peninsula becoming the foundation of its modernization, with engineers, teachers, scientists, and architects from the Fertile Crescent chaperoning and empowering the tribal leaders of the Peninsula and their communities as they come face-to-face with the desires of colonialists and imperialists. Rather than breaking with intellectual and political trends of West Asia, areas such as the Hijaz became important centers for the circulation of anti-colonialism and pro-Arab sentiment from Egypt. Meanwhile, Kuwait became a major destination for exiled Palestinians. 

Many of these migrant Arabs staffed the sites which produced oil, from the refineries to the roads and ports which enabled its exportation. As subjects of exploitation by local, regional Western powers, pro-Arab oil workers transformed the sites of oil production into spaces of mobilization and disruption of the global power order as experienced in Dubai, Kuwait, and Bahrain between the 1930-60s with mass demonstrations, strikes, and protests. These protests emerged as a result of changing labor conditions which favored work in the oil industries and damaged the everyday fabric as well as seasonal economic lifestyles of the region: the pearl diving labor class. Protests and unions of oil workers were also critical in the success of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Meanwhile, in culture, novels like Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun (1962) were also published as a result of these new labor and migration dynamics. 

The growing pro-Arab and self-organizing labor cultures in the oil sites of the Peninsula grew more threatening to Western energy corporations. British oil companies began to recruit en masse what it called “alien” workers to staff oil sites in the Peninsula region: indentured labor from South Asia. Considered to be de-politicized from the prevailing pro-Arab sentiment, and unconnected to the terrain, it was speculated that these labor configurations wouldn’t become affected by the Arab-centric calls for revolution. The labor “swapping” and confrontation helped set up an economic culture of labor resentment between what is seen as Arab and “local” in the Peninsula against an overwhelming foreign labor population; a culture which is extremely regimented in the labor landscapes of the Peninsula region today.

Revolutionary history in the Arabian Peninsula is connected to the pan-Arab sentiment circulating in West Asia. Yet, in the Southern parts of the Peninsula, Yemen and Oman, political revolution also came by way of Southeast Asia. Thawrat October, or the Aden Emergency as known in colonial history, was an anti-colonial movement by the Hadhramis—known as one of the world’s largest Muslim diaspora groups from the Hadhramaut province of Yemen—with ties to Indonesia’s communist party. Establishing the first free republic in the Peninsula, after staging a coup similar in style to Nasser’s Free Officers in Cairo in 1952, the Aden revolt was in response to British presence in Yemen as it began to incorporate parts of the hinterland. Across the border from South Yemen lay Dhofar, the western province of Oman, which sat at a unique nexus between the political ideas present in Aden, and the new Yemeni republic, as well as the oil sites of the Peninsula. 

During this period, Dhofar was a poverty-struck region of 200,000 inhabitants who lived in the extreme mountainous terrain of the province and survived through daily sustenance, such as through herding and hunting. The community was mostly illiterate and considered remote, with no settled infrastructure nor connections to the hinterland or metropolitan regions. The Omani Crown, a British ally and powerful Arab Indian Ocean Empire, which had annexed Dhofar, began to deport and enforce Dhofaris to work in Kuwait, Bahrain, Iraq, and in domestic oil sites to quell the rising pro-Arab sentiments. Over 20,000 male Dhofaris had migrated out of their communities to the boomtowns of the Peninsula, which ended up displacing the indigenous lifestyles of Dhofairs and created uneven conditions of co-dependency between the capital and the Dhofari hinterland. Assuming Dhofaris into the “alien” workers category backfired as the emigres found resonance with the anti-establishment and anti-exploitation rhetoric that was circulating at the time and brought their ideas home. 

Enshrining socialist, communist, and proletariat philosophy, the Dhofar Revolution fostered one of the longest armed resistances in West Asia which was completely unconnected, and in much greater success, than those experienced in the urban capitals of Arab nationalism. Additionally, Dhofaris had the support of neighboring Aden—not Cairo—which supplied it with arms, literature, and resources from the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China, helping the province grow into a resistance front akin to Vietnam and Cuba. The endurance of the resistance in fact became very threatening across the Peninsula for the narrative it was popularizing about colonial and capitalist forces exploiting the resources of the region. The eventual defeat of the Revolution required support from Britain, the United States, the Iranian Shah, and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who colluded together to eventually end the Revolution in 1975. 

Feminism had a major part in the ideals of Dhofar’s Revolution, as captured in Heiny Srour’s film The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974). Unlike the well-known Arab revolutionary histories, which called on the female Arab in the postcolonial republic to become educated, modernized, and scientific, Dhofar’s feminist principles called on women to resist and arm themselves against colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism. In fact, the feminist principles of the Revolution attracted not only Srour, but also Leila Abdu, a known Bahraini political activist and feminist, who played a major role in educating the female contingent of revolutionary Dhofar. The impetus for Srour, an intellectual and feminist avant-garde filmmaker from Lebanon, to venture out to Oman’s Dhofar was its unique championing of female empowerment, and what she observed as a deaftone response from regional and international political movements towards the Dhofari struggle. 

Of particular interest to this essay is Srour’s analysis of that response from her West Asian and pro-Arab vantage. In an interview about the making of the documentary, Srour describes herself as an “armchair intellectual” who initiated this project with idealistic images of the Revolution. She describes how during the process, she acknowledged her elite and educated Lebanese Francophone background, which is well-versed in Western-style guerilla and militant cinema and thereby impressionable of the cinema discipline more broadly. The headquarters of the movement’s frontier was almost 400 kilometers away from Dhofar’s capital, Salalah. There were no roads leading to the region, so one had to walk and climb mountains. She describes how she nearly died several times while attempting to reach the frontier. The background story reveals how collective imaginations of the Peninsula’s “cultural desert” permeate West Asian cultural production, historically and presently. It also suffers from the “modern desert affliction” which sees thinkers, artists, revolutionaries, migrating to the “empty” desert to fill it with something: meaning, sculpture, footage. 

Recounting her experience, Srour illustrates what is collectively memorialized as the sites and places of revolution (urban squares, underground presses, leftist cafes…) in contrast to where revolutionary thinking finds resonance and perhaps even success: in deserted, disconnected fringes. In fact, the experience of Srour testifies to the dissonances described between what she considered the urban and intellectual arena of political mobilization in relation to where she discovered the frontlines of revolution. Her offerings about her privilege sit at the heart of how the Arabian Peninsula is envisioned within the lens of Pan-Arab Hangover and its associated hyper Fertile Crescent-centrism. Generalizing the terrain of modern national revolution, as flat, urban, accessible, plural, and for all, Srour instead had to journey through the blindspots of the prevailing ideologies circulating at the time to problematize its inherent sense of aculturality and deterritoriality. What is gained through Srour’s experience is similar to what is learned from the underrepresentation of Dhofar’s history: a personal journey to self-realization is always political, and when one detaches from the center, they become part of irregularly dynamic nodes. ■