Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State 9780520960626

Citation preview

Paradoxes of Green

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Richard and Harriett Gold Endowment Fund in Arts and Humanities of the University of California Press Foundation.

Paradoxes of Green landscapes of a city-state

Gareth Doherty

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California Sections of the text contain some data or analytical points published in earlier forms including, “There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye: Green Urbanism in Bahrain,” Ecological Urbanism, Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty, eds. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010, 2016), 178–187; “In the west you have landscape, here we have . . .” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Vol. 34 (3), 2014, 201–206; “Bahrain’s Polyvocality and Landscape as a Medium,” The Right to Landscape: Contesting Landscape and Human Rights, Shelley Egoz, Jala Makhzoumi, Gloria Pungetti, eds., (Abingdon, Oxon: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 185–196; “Changing Hues of Green in Bahrain,” Society and Change in the Contemporary Gulf, A.K. Ramakrishnan and M.H. Ilias, editors, (New Delhi: New Century Publications, 2010); “If Its Not Green It Will Become Invisible: A Sociological Account of Green in Bahrain,” Al Manakh 2, Todd Reisz, ed., 2010, 342–345, and “How Green is Landscape Urbanism?” Topos (71), Munich, 2010, 32–35. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Doherty, Gareth, author. Title: Paradoxes of green : landscapes of a city-state / Gareth Doherty. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016030087 (print) | lccn 2016031250 (ebook) | isbn 9780520285019 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 0520285018 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520285026 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 0520285026 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520960626 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Urban landscape architecture—Bahrain. | Green—Social aspects—Bahrain. | Colors—Social aspects—Bahrain. | Greenbelts— Bahrain. Classification: lcc sb472.7 .d64 2017 (print) | lcc sb472.7 (ebook) | ddc 712/.5095365—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030087 Manufactured in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

18

17

For Miss Magee

:‫ﺛﻼﺛﺔ ﺃﺷﻴﺎء ﻳﺬﻫﺒﻦ ﺍﻟﺤﺰﻥ‬ ‫ﺍﻟﻤﺎء ﻭﺍﻟﺨﻀﺮﺓ ﻭﺍﻟﻮﺟﻪ ﺍﻟﺤﺴﻦ‬ Thala–that ashya–ʿ yudhhibn al-h. uzn: al-ma–ʿ wa-l-khud. ra wa-l-wajh al-h. asan Three things take away sadness: water, greenery, and a beautiful face

Contents

Notes on Transliteration and Translation Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Two Seas, Many Greens

viii ix

1

1.

Green Scenery

22

2.

The Blueness of Green

40

3.

How Green Can Become Red

60

4.

The Memory of Date Palm Green

76

5.

The Struggle for the Manama Greenbelt

91

6.

The Promise of Beige

102

7.

Brightening Green

120

8.

The Whiteness of Green

140

Notes

155

Glossary

173

List of Named Participants

177

Bibliography

179

Index

187

Plate section follows page 52

Notes on Transliteration and Translation

Transliterations of Modern Standard Arabic and Bahraini dialect are modified from the conventions of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES). Specifically, IJMES conventions were followed for technical terms and expressions and vocabulary in Arabic, but proper and place names conform with their general attestation in English spelling in a Bahrain-related context. For example, rather than use the IJMES spelling shaykh, I use sheikh, which is standard in the Arab States of the Persian Gulf. Many place and institutional names in Bahrain have generally “accepted” English spellings, which I use, that do not conform to a standard and have many varieties, for example, Riffa, rather than al-Rifaʿ. Personal names like Alireza, Isa, and Latif are generally accepted spellings of these names in English. With the exception of a few public figures, all names in this book have been changed.

viii

Preface and Acknowledgments

My first encounter with Bahrain was when I responded to an advertisement in Landscape Design, the journal of the Landscape Institute in London, which called for speakers on landscape architecture at a conference in Manama. It was 2003, and I had just returned to London from a semester teaching in Australia; the advertisement was by then a few months old. Although I replied immediately, the Bahrain Society of Engineers had already found a speaker for the conference, but invited me to teach a three-day course on landscape architecture the following year. My visit was to follow in May 2004, and one of the workshop participants, a prince from the royal family, first introduced me to Bahrain’s greenery on a nighttime drive around the palm groves on the west coast of the island. Thus started a curiosity about Bahrain that has stayed with me ever since. I found the multitude of green spaces in an incredibly arid landscape intriguing, and even more intriguing was the absence of an adequate translation of the word landscape into Arabic. I realized that rather than my teaching Bahrain about landscape, Bahrain would teach me. Shortly after my introduction to Bahrain, I began doctoral studies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and expanded on this initial encounter through classes in Arabic, Islam, Middle East ethnography, and political economy, and in due course my dissertation. First of all, I ix

x

preface

thank my adviser, Hashim Sarkis, for encouraging, facilitating, and guiding this research. My doctoral committee members, Steven Caton, Niall Kirkwood, and Charles Waldheim, have each been immensely encouraging and helpful throughout the process of researching, writing, and revising. I also acknowledge my doctoral colleagues and friends, Rania Ghosn, El Hadi Jazairy, Antonio Petrov, Stephen Ramos, and Neyran Turan, for their intellectual stimulation. In the summer of 2006 we began an intense series of discussions on geography and design. We shared an adviser, Hashim Sarkis, and a frustration with scale. We asked why is it that design disciplines—architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and urban planning—all have a particular scalar focus? Our common interests led to the founding of the New Geographies journal. This book began in parallel with these discussions and uses ethnography of a color in a city-state as a way to overcome limitations of scale and better engage not just with the land but with the people who inhabit the land, which together comprise a landscape. In doing so, my goal is to challenge design disciplines to address color and engage with our various audiences (human and nonhuman). In dong so, we may find more ways for anthropologists and designers to collaborate. The year I spent in Bahrain brought me into contact with countless Bahraini voices. Those who helped me in so many ways, directly and indirectly, are far too numerous to mention here, but are all personally remembered. Thanks to the various ministries in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. At the Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs, Sheikh Hamad Mohamed al-Khalifa and his team were gracious and welcoming. Dr. Maher Abouseif and Ahmed al-Jowder introduced me to lemon tea over many conversations at the ministry. Dr. Falah al-Khubaisy showed great kindness and invited me back to Bahrain on subsequent visits. Dominic McPolin, my compatriot, was also very generous with his time. Ali Akbar Bushiri selflessly spent endless hours discussing minutiae of life in Bahrain, historical and contemporary. Akbar’s wife, Jenny, patiently sat through our discussions. I was very fortunate in that my time in Bahrain overlapped for a couple of weeks with Nelida Fuccaro, an astute historian of Manama’s urban form, from whom I learned a lot. Sheikha Mai al-Khalifa invited me to give a lecture at the Bahrain National Museum during my fieldwork. This opportunity was instrumen-

preface

xi

tal in introducing me to Jalal Mageed and Eugene McMahon, and in turn Dr. Akbar Jaffari. Abdul Hadi al-Mukhareq introduced me to many people who in turn helped with my work. Samer al-Gilani and staff at the Bayt al-Qurʾan in Manama provided helpful assistance in searching the various books of the hadith. James Onley introduced me to the Bahrain walkers, especially Charles Price, Alan and Elspeth Wright, Anne al-Jalahma, Farida Khunji, Jens and Lone Ejstrup Reinholdt, and Nina and Ulrik Clausen, who in their various conversations on Friday walks were more helpful than they probably imagine. John A. Davies, “a gardener sent by God,” and his assistant Renita provided tea and biscuits and great conversation, at John’s office or at the British Club. I regret that I met Camille Zakharia only as I was leaving Bahrain: there was so much to talk about. Anny the housekeeper, Nader Ardalan, Mustapha Ben Hamouche, Ahmed Dailami, Rami Elsamahy, Yasser Elshestawy, Kelly Hutzell, Boris Brorman Jensen, Ahmed Kanna, Abdullah Kareem, George Katodrytis, Tim Kennedy, Emmanuel Lamort, Amer Moustafa, Harvey Paige, Frank F. Sabouri, Marco Sacchi, and Ahlam Zainal all provided valuable help and advice during my fieldwork and writing. Jessica Barnes, Hamed Bukhamseen, Ali Akbar Bushiri, Mohamad Chakaki, Nelida Fuccaro, Thomas Fibiger, Jock Heron, Li Hou, Kathryn Moore, Ali Karimi, Sawsan Karimi, Mariano Gomez Luque, Todd Reisz, Charles A. Riley, Jasmine Samara, and Bernardo Zaca all read drafts of the chapters and provided much-appreciated comments. At Harvard University, the Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship allowed me to spend the 2007–2008 academic year in Bahrain and the Gulf. The Rice Scholarship for Irish Students at Harvard University Graduate School of Design supported my doctoral studies. I thank my former teachers and now colleagues at the GSD including Anita Berrizbeitia, Gary Hilderbrand, Alex Krieger, Mohsen Mostafavi, Patricia Roberts, and John R. Stilgoe. Special thanks to Susan Nigra Snyder and George E. Thomas for their encouragement—demanding regular updates—in getting this manuscript to completion. Ali Asani, William Granara, Nicolas Roth, and Himmet Taskomur—my first Arabic teacher—answered my questions about some-

xii

preface

times small but nevertheless important details. Heartfelt thanks to my students, especially of the design anthropology course, for challenging me. Jae Rossman, the Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color, Yale University Library, New Haven; and Neil Parkinson, archives and collections manager, Colour Reference Library, Royal College of Art, London, provided help with literature searches. I thank H. H. Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi and Dr. Y. Adabi for permission to reproduce the map of the Green Sea, and the following for their dedicated assistance in obtaining images used in the book: Scott Walker, Jonathan Rosenwasser, and David Weimer of the Harvard Map Collection; Micah Hoggatt, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Lisa DeCesare, Harvard University Herbaria; Nell K. Carlson of AndoverHarvard Theological Library; Adnan Alarrayed and Philippa Clayre of J. Walter Thompson; and Rui Pires, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo. Suryani Oka Dewa Ayu’s anthropological eye and acute attention to detail has been invaluable as I finalized the manuscript. Jian He, Felipe Vera, Janet Wysocki, and Hannes Zander all helped at various stages of the work. I thank also Barbara Elfman, former program administrator of the GSD’s Advanced Studies Program, whose support was instrumental. Robert Daurio developed the cover design together with the University of California Press. Jane Acheson and Melissa Vaughn were instrumental in editing my words, and I am very grateful for their careful advice. Fares Alsuwaidi meticulously guided the Arabic transliterations. At the University of California Press, I am indebted to Reed Malcom, whose determination saw the project through from proposal to printed work. I thank Stacy Eisenstark and Zuha Khan for their coordination, and Elizabeth Berg and Francisco Reinking for their edits. Thanks too to Carolyn Deuschle Wheeler and Tobiah Waldron for proofreading and indexing respectively, as well as the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University for supporting the final edits and index. Moisés Lino e Silva inspired and challenged me throughout the process of writing this book from being part of my initial fieldwork in Bahrain through the completed manuscript. And, I thank my family in Ireland who supported me throughout and in particular my mother, Miss Magee, who lived to see the draft manuscript, and to whom the book is dedicated.

Introduction two seas, many greens On looking out to sea on the morning of a clear sky and a fresh nor’wester, it would seem as if nature, at all times lavish of effect, had here, however, exhausted every tint of living green in her paint box. —E. L. Durand, “Notes on the Islands of Bahrain and Antiquities”

The presence of green in cities is often not very green from an environmental point of view. In fact, the provision of greenery in urban areas, with few exceptions, bears significant environmental costs in terms of the resources required to maintain it. To have and to be green is often presented as a moral imperative, yet the provision of urban greenery can be morally questionable, especially in arid environments such as Bahrain. Thus the main paradox of this book. Urban green regularly takes the form of “landscape” or “landscape architecture,” a particularly refined or imagined form of landscape.1 Landscape alludes to many typologies: gardens, parks, cemeteries, and so on, expanding in scale to “the object spread out beneath an airplane window” and beyond.2 This understanding of landscape might include desert, cities, and green space. When I began my fieldwork, I was interested in the hard and soft infrastructures that sustained varied landscapes at a range of scales—and in their relationships with the land, one another, and people: the urbanism of landscape. I chose Bahrain because in an island just ten miles wide and thirty miles long, and a nation- as well as citystate, I suspected that the relationships of hard and soft infrastructures

1

2

introduction

and their constituents could more easily be traced here than in a city with a large footprint and a proximate hinterland.3 Landscape, in Bahrain, as I came to understand, is a word mostly associated with the contrast of constructed green to an indigenous arid environment. Perhaps this is because the word’s closest Arabic equivalent is manz. ar t. abı–ʿı–, which translates literally as “natural scenery,” but has the connotation of “beautiful scenery.” During my year of fieldwork, I noticed different understandings of the word among my Bahraini interlocutors than my British Isles and North American training had led me to expect. Often people I talked with referred to al-khud. ra, or “greenery,” more often than not describing the luscious, tropical-style, carefully tended gardens full of foliage that compete with one another for the Bahrain Gardening Club prize. I was interested not just in these verdant, curated landscapes of the elites but in the ordinary landscapes where everyday life is lived, as well as in the larger matrix of infrastructures that holds them all together. In an attempt to better communicate with my interlocutors in Bahrain and engage in a conversation on the “urbanism of landscape,” I began to focus my fieldwork on concepts of “green” in an arid urban environment. In doing so, I adopted my interlocutors’ category for landscape, taking into account green’s spatially and culturally varied referents. During my fieldwork, I walked through Bahrain almost every day, recording my encounters with green through many different means. Walking brought me in touch with the greenery but also with people I might otherwise not have met. I encountered native Bahrainis and expatriates, manual laborers and professionals, and asked them all about green. When I met green, I would talk with people about its meanings and significances, taking notes on paper (first as scratch notes, later written up in fieldnotes) or as “headnotes” in the back of my mind.4 I made sketches and took photographs. I even tried recording the various shades of green I encountered using watercolors, until I realized that the light was a critical element which I could not easily capture with paint. Since I was primarily interested in green, I first tried to abstract the color from the object, akin to blurring my vision, to remove the form of the object and focus purely on the hue of the green. I meant to dissociate color from the object and redescribe objects from the perspective of their color, leading to a dynamic spatial reorganization and hopefully revealing latent

two seas, many greens

3

patterns. I imagined an exhibition, for example, in which I would display a catalog of shades of green, each hue accompanied by a summary of the object, organized by color rather than by the objects themselves. Although I still see merit in this experiment, the power of the objects that happened to be green always insisted on overcoming any attempts at pure abstraction. For this reason, the chapters in this book, while arranged by color, are also associated with a particular object or set of relationships. Often associated with the presence of freshwater, green and greenery might seem completely out of place in Bahrain’s arid climate, soaring temperatures, and sandy desert. This book explores some of the concepts of green I encountered during a year of ethnographic fieldwork informed by walking. Bahrain has numerous constituencies that expect greenery, and some that do not. Greenery is at the heart of political struggles over the land of the small city-state. Green is central to the second sea that gives Bahrain its name. These are good reasons to delve deeper into an exploration of green and other colors in the kingdom.

f ra me w or k I came to the realization that, although conceptually the color green can be separated from objects that are green—and I still try to do this—in practice such separation is not the most productive way to understand the daily importance of green. That is to say that green is inherently related to the objects it colors and therefore becomes part of the pragmatic meaning and value of these objects.5 Indeed, concepts of color and object are mutually defining. If you remove the color from the object, what are you left with? Color is inherently related to the object that is colored. The object and green are not independent, considering that the object which happens to be green also has an impact on the perception of green. For this reason, I suggest that a discussion on color is inherently a discussion on design, for color and design are not easily disassociated. A discussion about green that is meant to be more meaningful to design and environmental practices needs to necessarily include a better understanding of the objects, spaces, places, and relationships that happen (or aspire) to be green in daily life.

4

introduction

Color and object are impossible to separate. Take a blue door, for example. We may refer to it as a “door” or as a “blue door.” We may invite someone to “shut the door, please,” or even “shut the blue door,” but we would never say, “Shut the blue, please.” While color and the object are intertwined, the object predominates. But color is more than an adjective. Philosophers grapple with color, and there is no consensus as to whether an object is colored or not. Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, both philosophers of color, maintain that these are the critical questions to ask regarding colored objects: “Are physical objects colored? And if so, what is the nature of the color properties?” These questions, they say, form the basis of color realism.6 They identify four positions relative to color realism: eliminativists say color is not part of an object and see color as a sort of illusion; for dispositionalists, “the property green (for example) is a disposition to produce certain perceptual states: roughly, the disposition to look green”; physicalists, such as Byrne and Hilbert, regard green as a physical property of an object; meanwhile primitivists agree that objects have colors but do not agree that color is identical to the physical property of the object that is colored.7 But green is more than color; it is relational. The study of color in isolation proves to be conceptually interesting but not the most useful in pragmatic and spatial terms, and this book attempts to rebalance the importance of color vis-à-vis objects and their relationships. If we are to understand the significance of “green” to our current lives and environmental predicaments, the agency of color and objects needs to be considered. Above all, the specific relationships between color and objects need to be better understood for better design. Color is most meaningful in its context. To this end the book is inherently concerned with the spatiality and geographies of color in the built—and grown—urban environment. My aim is to add to discussions on color in design at the urban and indeed regional scale, a topic little explored in the design literature. If color is a property that helps to give meaning to objects, then color is a design element that needs to be considered as much as any other attribute of those objects. Color has complex meanings and associations. It is perceived, and it influences perception. Color embodies both individual and collective values, but is never detached from relations. Green, the main focus of this book, is a synecdoche for landscape, and like my Bahraini interlocutors, I sometimes use the terms inter-

two seas, many greens

5

changeably. The study began by focusing on the urbanism of landscape in Bahrain, specifically relating to the social, technical, and political infrastructures required to construct and maintain landscape in the arid desert environment. On my first few visits, I noticed that new urban developments were often preceded by green landscape: it was common to “green” the desert where buildings were meant to go before the buildings got built. This surprising sequence of construction would tend to support Charles Waldheim’s claim that landscape “replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.”8 Waldheim, who uses the term landscape urbanism “to describe emerging landscape design practices in the context of North American urbanism,” argues that landscape is a more important driving force for urbanization than is architecture; this claim seems to have some currency in Bahrain, which has undergone an intense period of urban development routinely preceded by green. 9 This seeming deference of architecture to landscape enabled me to investigate Waldheim’s thesis outside of the European or American context. Urban development projects in Bahrain, such as artificial islands and reclamation projects, are the result of pressures for urbanization in a nation-state that is outgrowing its land mass. The question is not if but how, and where, the state will grow, and how green that growth will be. Growth and green become ambiguous terms united conceptually in their ties to the rapacious appetite for development under capitalism. One of the paradoxes of green is that although it is primarily visual, there is more to green than meets the eye. And as we will see in this book, there is more than one green. Before addressing the hues of green in Bahrain more specifically in the various chapters of the book, let me first elaborate on a fundamental question: why Bahrain?

w h y b a hra i n ? Simply, Bahrain is small and self-contained. The urbanism of its landscape and the infrastructures required to maintain that landscape in an arid environment are all compressed into one walkable area comprising about three hundred square miles, surrounded by water, under the governance of one state. I briefly toyed with basing myself in Dubai, chiefly

6

introduction

because its novelty as a city that preceded infrastructure would make it also worthy of scrutiny. My chief Bahraini friend and interlocutor, Isa, a historian, convinced me otherwise. “Dubai’s history is very short,” he insisted. “Bahrain is much more complex.” Isa was hinting at the multiple histories in Bahrain built up over millennia. The Kingdom of Bahrain is proportionately the smallest, densest, and greenest of the Arab Gulf states. Bahrain’s aridity and political and social complexities contribute to its insatiable compulsion for urban greenery, an impulse that is not particular to one nation but rather global. Bahrain’s appetite for green is illustrative of an obsession for urban greenery that pervades cities around the world and is simply at an extreme in this particular location. Although green is a global urban phenomenon, the seductive power of green has deep cultural associations in Bahrain. Despite its hot and dry climate, Bahrain has long had a reputation as a green oasis amid the beige landscapes of the Arabian or Persian Gulf region. This verdant history is largely due to the plethora of underground and underwater springs that give Bahrain its name: al-Bahrain literally means “the Two Seas” in Arabic. The first “sea,” the Gulf that surrounds the archipelago of thirty-three islands, is one of the most polluted and stagnant waterways in the world. The second sea was composed of rich, often turquoise, freshwater springs that punctuated the landscape and seabed and allowed for the cultivation of greenery and the flourishing of urban development in Bahrain for millennia. I say “was” because this source has been overextracted to the degree that some say there no longer is a second sea. Or if there is, it is the desalination plants that provide most of the country’s colorless freshwater. The Gulf that surrounds Bahrain is an extension of the Indian Ocean flowing through the Strait of Hormuz and bounded at the north by the Shatt al-Arab river delta, formed by the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.10 Early Islamic geographers referred to all or parts of the Indian Ocean as the Green Sea on account of its green or light blue-green color.11 Some historical texts and maps actually refer to the Gulf as the Green Sea.12 For example, a map detail dating from c. 1651 a.d., “A description of the earth into which the inhabitants of Babel dispersed after the destruction of the tower,” clearly shows the Sinvs Persicvs, the Persian Bay, referred to as Alachdar, the Green (Sea).13 Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), the

two seas, many greens

7

Tunis-born Arab historian, referred to what is today known as the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf as al-Khalij al-Akhdar (the Green Gulf ).14 The Arabic saying “Three things take away sadness: water, greenery, and a beautiful face” (Thala–that ashya–ʿ yudhhibn al-h. uzn: al-ma–ʿ wa-lkhud. ra wa-l-wajh al-h. asan), which I heard from many sources, is often misattributed to the hadith, the stories and reports surrounding the Prophet Muhammad.15 It has also been wrongly attributed to Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law and first caliph following the Prophet’s death. The absence of the saying from the books of the hadith and its prevalence in the Arabic-speaking world indicate the likelihood that the saying is preIslamic; the mythical power of green in the region actually precedes Islam, despite the close association. The allure of green in the Gulf is often considered directly attributable to Islam, yet the proverb indicates that green has a long and deep significance in the region, potentially far longer and deeper than is popularly understood.16 Many myths and legends touch on Bahrain’s origins. One of the most enduring and compelling is the idea of Bahrain as the site of the Garden of Eden. The Book of Genesis describes Eden as sited at the confluence of four rivers—the Euphrates, Tigris, Gihon, and Pishon—which some scholars have argued converged at the head of the Gulf.17 Some geographers have even suggested that an analysis of satellite images shows traces of the four rivers converging close to Bahrain, although this does seem a stretch.18 Bahrain was also counted as part of a second Eden, the Dilmun civilization. Dilmun was at its height from the late fourth millennium to 800 b.c., in what is currently Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia. The Epic of Gilgamesh, composed in Mesopotamia in at least 2,000 b.c., suggests a holy and pure land where no one grows old.19 “Let your wells of bitter water become wells of sweet water, Let your furrowed fields and acres yield you their grain, Let your city become the ‘dock-yard’house of the (inhabited) land.”20 Dilmun, or Bahrain, was a land of immortality, largely one would assume on account of its greenery. Father Eric Burrows S.J., a Jesuit historian writing in 1928, claimed a reference to Bahrain in Qurʾan 55.19–22, al-Rahman, that he translated, “He has mingled the two seas that meet one another, (but) between them is a division that they do not overpass. From these there come forth pearls and pearls.”21 Indeed, the mingling of Bahrain’s distinctive waters, the two

8

introduction

seas, has been credited with producing the distinctive pearls that helped make Bahrain a locus of trade in the Gulf before the oil era.22 Examining historical documents such as those cited above confirmed for me Isa’s assertion that Bahrain has a long history worth studying; it has the allure of escape and immortality. My interest in history is primarily in terms of how it relates to the present and the future. I spent some time in the field talking with Bahrainis about my research topic. After a long sequence of conversations, I realized that the word landscape in Bahrain has aesthetic expectations that are invariably linked with green. The desert is not always considered wonderful. In the movie Lawrence of Arabia, Prince Feisal remarks, “I think you are another of these desert-loving English: Doughty, Stanhope, Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert; we love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing.”23 Not to deny the complexities of the allure of the desert; the popularity of desert camping, horse riding, falcon hunting, and training; and the importance of the desert in the popular imaginary in Bahrain; however, the point is that green has a special allure because of its contrast with the desert, and Bahrain is an exemplary case. Together water and greenery create food and beauty in the harsh, arid, urban environment. Mythology that characterizes green as an object of longing is common in the Gulf and has contributed to the idea of Bahrain as a place of escape, not just to water but also to the green date palm groves and the agriculture that took place between the palms. Date palm groves have historically lined the north and west coasts of Bahrain, although their continuous landscape may not be so green for much longer. Chris and Marion Cormes, self-described amateur naturalists who published Wild Flowering Plants of Bahrain, describe the island in 1989 as a desert crowned with the gray-greenery of date palms: “Bahrain is a pale hazy island, crowned in the north by a grey-green swath of date palm plantations, gardens, and fields. Southwards, al-barr, lies flat stony desert relieved by a few gentle hills and escarpments and dotted with rounded scrub bushes.”24 The gray-green areas along coasts have been gradually disappearing for years. Mostly they are replaced with villas, lawns, and flowering shrubs, and brighter hues of green. In contrast, the desert, albarr, is by and large intact, protected by the oil that sits underneath and the oil pipes that crisscross the landscape, rendering it unsuitable for

two seas, many greens

9

development. The impossibility of developing the inland desert places more pressure on the date palm groves that line the coasts. When locals discuss the topic of green in Bahrain, the reduction in Bahrain’s traditional green areas and the associated increase in urbanization are invariably lamented. The standard rhetoric among some social groups includes, “Oh! Bahrain used to be very green, but they destroyed it!” This suggests a deep nostalgia, as well as anger toward those who took the green away—developers of villas, or the expatriates who live in the new housing developments, or the government that allows and sometimes encourages development. There is also an association in the popular imagination of green with agriculture. For the villagers who live among the diminishing date palm groves along the north and west coasts, greenery is part of their lives. My friend Alireza, whose family owns a date palm plantation, told me that greenery for the Bahraini merchants of Persian descent, the ʿAjam, is no less important. Alireza, a member of a prominent ʿAjami family, told me that it used to be a requirement for all ʿAjami houses to have a garden, and that these gardens were important for social prestige. He observed that the winners of garden competitions sponsored by the Bahrain Gardening Club usually came from within the ʿAjami community. The motto of the garden club is “Good gardeners make good neighbors,” implying a social benefit from the act of gardening. Alireza went on to observe that the new generation of Bahrainis of Persian origin do not value the art of gardening, instead preferring to travel. Alireza was not alone in telling me that gardens are not part of the culture of the tribal Arabs who govern the state. Greenery is synonymous with the date palms in Bahrain, almost always understood by native Bahrainis to mean the gray-green shades of the groves and other agriculture. Yet green is also very much part of the urbanized present, and this book addresses changes in perception and meaning—and hues—now taking place in Bahrain. The complex and dappled subtle greens of the date palm groves are being replaced by the brighter—and universal—monochromes of green lawns, parks, roundabouts, and roadside strips.25 These nonindigenous grass greens are often presented in news and marketing as the greens of today’s Bahrain. Countless Bahrainis told me that more greenery would solve all of the social problems of Bahrain. The implication was that green would create

10

introduction

a pleasant oasis where everyone would be happy, and sadness would be taken away by “water, greenery, and a beautiful face.” My fieldnotes began to reveal almost messianic properties imbued in the word green. Time and again, I heard that Bahrain needed more green, so many times that I realized my queries were prompting a specific response: when I told people I was studying green, they gave me the answer they thought I wanted to hear. It was only when I approached the topic of green obliquely, as a study of “contemporary landscape and urbanism in Bahrain,” that I was able to ask questions neutrally and ethically.

a s h or t in t r o d uc t i o n t o b a h ra i n Bahrain sits on top of the Awali Oil Field, part of the Greater Ghawar Uplift, the 1932 discovery of which, through the tenacious efforts of the New Zealander “Major” Frank Holmes (known as Abu al-Naft, “the Father of Oil”), sparked the development of the contemporary Bahraini infrastructural landscape.26 In a relatively short time, with oil as the catalyst, Bahrain became what is now one of the most densely populated countries in the world, requiring an urban infrastructure and—with its limited natural resources and capacity for agriculture—a thriving import trade. Bahrain is just a few square kilometers larger than Singapore and smaller than London or New York. As a small island, Bahrain’s geographical boundaries are specific and firm, making the infrastructures required of the nation-state clearly visible and traceable. Bahrain’s urban development can be tracked from the discovery of oil in the 1930s to the 1970s, when urbanization really took off, to the present day. This trajectory of urbanization is linked not just to the discovery of oil but to wider geopolitical forces, not least the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, when banking moved from Beirut to Bahrain. Although Bahrain’s population is five times smaller than Singapore’s, Bahrain is also a city-state. It has reached capacity with its current development typologies and will have to build either out into the sea or upward with high-rise buildings. Due to development pressures, Bahrain has recently been growing outward. Part of the argument used to validate the reclamation projects and the construction of its

two seas, many greens

11

artificial islands (some US$20 billion of projects off the coast of Manama alone) is that they are the more financially viable than building on the main island. It is more cost effective to reclaim land from the sea than to buy land on the mainland of Bahrain, where land prices are often presented, prohibitively, as being “the equivalent of downtown Chicago.” (I always found this comparison strange until I learned that the office preparing the Bahrain master plan was based in Chicago.) A sizable proportion of Bahrain is undeveloped from a building point of view, especially the desert in the southern part of the island, which is off limits because of the oil fields; the main urban centers are in the north, along with the majority of the new developments. This is also where the greenery is, both the traditional hues and the globalized colors of green. Bahrain’s population exploded from 70,000 in the 1920s to about 200,000 in 1970, and to almost 700,000 in 2006 (including 250,000 foreigners, mostly from India and Pakistan, with about 3,000 British citizens). In 2008, the government acknowledged that the population had crossed the 1 million mark. In 2016 the population had reached 1.4 million. Meanwhile, the population of Bahraini citizens has grown from almost even Sunni and Shiʿi populations in the mid-twentieth century to a 70/30 percent Shiʿi and Sunni divide. Given that the rulers of the state are mostly Sunni, these demographic changes inevitably lead to differences of traditions in everyday practice, and political and social tension, which plays out in ways both subtle and overt. I am conscious of how insufficient the terms Shiʿi and Sunni actually are, especially having grown up during the Northern Ireland conflict, which is often overly simplified as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants. I use the terms Shiʿi and Sunni in full acknowledgment of their inadequacies in describing the depth and nuances of the situation. The urban historian Nelida Fuccaro describes a three-tier system of settlement that developed in Bahrain during the nineteenth century among the tribal Arabs, the indigenous Baharna population, and the merchant classes.27 Tribal Arabs—nomadic families from the Arabian peninsula—mostly arrived after the al-Khalifa annexed the Bahraini islands in 1783. They established settlements in Muharraq, Budaiya, Hidd, Riffa al-Qibli (West Riffa), and Riffa al-Sharqi (East Riffa). The descendants of these settlers today make up around one-fifth of the population and

12

introduction

Table 1

Population Growth in Bahrain 1960–2015 as of january 1 each year

Year

Population

1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015

162,501 187,348 213,102 266,686 359,902 419,425 495,944 563,730 668,239 879,534 1,251,513 1,432,195

source: countrymeters.info

represent the majority of the ruling classes; they are exclusively Sunni Muslims. Their settlements remain separate from the villages of the indigenous nontribal Arab community, the Baharna. These Baharna villages dot the date palm groves of the north and west coasts. The Baharna, who are invariably Shiʿa, currently make up about half the local population of Bahrain.28 The third ethnic group, the merchant classes, occupied the cosmopolitan port city of Manama, the capital. These merchants would be either ‘Ajam or Hawala. The ʿAjam were of Persian origin, whereas the Hawala—al-ʿArab wa-l-ʿAjam (Arabs and ʿAjam)—are mostly regarded as Arabs who had lived for a time in southern Persia and returned to Bahrain with Persian ways, including language.29 With waves of immigration of mostly Sunni Muslims from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria—especially post-independence in 1971—Bahraini society has become even more multifaceted. Large numbers of expatriates now live in Juffair, Adliya, Budaiya, Saar, and new reclaimed developments such as Amwaj Island and Reef Island along the northern coast. The old center of Manama is populated with low-income workers, and few of the traditional merchant classes live there any longer. I have heard many Bahrainis say

two seas, many greens

13

ruefully—particularly those from the ruling classes—that there are so many expatriate workers that Manama is no longer Bahrain but a suburb of Mumbai. Today, Bahrain is among the highest consumers of water globally. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries have the highest per capita water consumption in the world.30 The swelling population and increased industrialization bring demands for more and more water, resulting in a recordlow water table. The Dammam Aquifer has been depleted and salinized since urbanization began in the early 1970s. Although the production and refining of petroleum still accounts for about 60 percent of Bahrain’s export receipts and government revenues, and makes up about 30 percent of the GDP, oil reserves too have been depleted.31 Bahrain has about 632 million barrels of reserve, compared to Saudi Arabia’s 266 billion barrels.32 Knowing its oil reserves were limited, Bahrain was the first Gulf state to seriously diversify its economy, beginning in the 1970s via industry and, later, international banking, helped by the oil revenues of the 1970s. Industry primarily consisted of crude oil piped from Saudi Arabia to the oil refinery at Sitra; the Alba aluminum plant processed bauxite imported from South Africa and Saudi Arabia. The 1975–90 civil war in Lebanon drove the international banks based there to seek relocation abroad, and Bahrain capitalized on this opportunity by establishing a tax haven and promoting its position between East and West, as well as its political stability. The country had the ambition of taking over as the banking center for the Arab world and a center for Islamic banking and finance, and today Bahrain is home to many banks and insurance companies. The infrastructure to sustain the new urbanization was rapidly constructed, often with support from Saudi Arabia, the most notable example being the billion-dollar King Fahd Causeway that links Bahrain with Saudi Arabia, and is named after the Saudi king from 1982–2005. The causeway brings five million Saudis to Bahrain annually. Saudis commonly call Bahrain al-Ba–r, “the Bar,” due to its liberal approach to alcohol compared to the surrounding countries. Having surpassed Singapore in terms of land area—Bahrain is now approaching 800 square kilometers33—and with an advanced post-oil economy, Bahrain, like its neighbors Dubai, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, is positioning itself as a global real estate investment destination, a “Singapore of the Middle East.”34

14

introduction

The current massive development drive is the main armature of this repositioning. Projects include a plethora of artificial islands, reclamation projects, high-rise buildings (at one stage plans were presented for the highest building in the world, reportedly more than two hundred meters higher than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai), and a proposed new forty-kilometer-long “Friendship” causeway with its former adversary Qatar, as well as a radical expansion of the causeway between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. In the process, it is not just the physical outline, aerial perspectives, and iconic images of the kingdom that are being transformed, but its environments, economies, mobilities, and political and social equilibriums.35 Although at face value the country is an absolute monarchy, the Bahraini governance structure reflects the complications and nuances of Bahraini society. With more than three thousand members in the royal family and a family council housed in its own official building, government is on one level a family affair. And as with any family, there are complex and dynamic allegiances among its members and between the family and the outside. Members of the royal family may normally marry only within the family. Men may occasionally out-marry, but only with a family of perceived equal status, so they sometimes look to neighboring ruling families in the Gulf states. One sheikh from the edges of the royal family whom I occasionally met for dinner explained his frustration at being perceived as special on account of his name (I joked with him that this did not stop him from accepting the best seat in restaurants when it was offered). The king, crown prince, and prime minister each have a distinct role in maintaining a delicate balance of power.36 As one civil servant explained to me, “There are three governments in Bahrain right now”: the Royal Court, headed by King Hamad; the cabinet, headed by the prime minister, Sheikh Khalifa; and the Economic Development Board (EDB), headed by the crown prince, Sheikh Salman. I noted that the Sunni-majority parliament, established with the democratic reforms in 2002, was not included in this description of the Bahraini power structure. There, the Sunni/Shiʿi distinction is complimented with a religious/secular divide, further complicating matters, and some say reducing its relevance. At one point, in January 2008, the tensions between the prime minister and the crown prince appeared to heighten when the Cambridge-educated crown prince wrote a public letter to his father, the king, complaining that

two seas, many greens

15

the EDB was being overruled by the ministries. The king replied, also publicly, that where a conflict existed between the ministries and the EDB, the EDB should always take precedence. My interlocutors indicated a general agreement that the levels of infrastructural development required of Bahrain could be completed only if the ministries were circumvented. Had they gone through regular channels, they would have been delayed by bureaucracy. Even though the complex power structure is often presented as autocratic, many see the checks and balances of the system as being much more effective than in a formal democracy. They describe the rulers’ accessibility through the majlis structure as being a highly democratic system of governance. Several Bahraini interlocutors expressed their abiding love for the authorities. At one conference on sustainable cities I attended at Arabian Gulf University a senior academic began her talk by proclaiming the “sustainable love” Bahraini citizens have for their rulers. One senior civil servant echoed a wider narrative when he told me of his willingness to “fight to the end” to defend the state from Shiʿa opposition, which, he told me, would set everything back by five hundred years if they gained significant power. “An autocratic regime in this case breeds a kind of anarchy” explained Ismaʿil, a medical doctor and pulmonary specialist, while we were having coffee together in Costa Coffee. While acknowledging the ability of the state to act strongly (as in the case of infrastructure developments and the various uprisings), Ismaʿil pointed out that the layered leadership within such a large familial monarchy may actually be weaker than elected officials in a democratic state, because of the complex system of retaining allegiances. “There are issues which the royal family chooses not to control, or cannot.” Ismaʿil, a Shiʿi, expressed his hope for significant political change, taking his faith from the Shiʿa revival elsewhere. There are many perspectives on the loci of Bahraini power, and my objective here is simply to articulate some of those I met in my fieldwork. The complexities and paradoxes of the Bahraini governance system are not new. Bahrain has for centuries been an entrepôt in the Persian Gulf and an object of political wrangling and intrigue: the Babylonians, Persians, Portuguese, and British all had their turn at ruling the islands. Al-Khalifa, the ruling family since 1783, has sometimes had a tenuous

16

introduction

hold on Bahrain, relying since the mid-nineteenth century on the support of the British, who held Bahrain as a protectorate until the country gained full independence in 1971. In that year Bahrain, like its neighbor Qatar, opted for full independence rather than joining the United Arab Emirates. Despite independence, Bahrain relies on the Gulf Cooperation Council states, especially Saudi Arabia, for foreign policy.37 Since independence, Bahrain has hosted the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, based in Juffair like the British navy before them, close to but separated from the capital. Despite Bahrain’s independence, on a recent visit, post–Arab Spring, one of my interlocutors, Latif, referring to the visible presence of the Saudi army, which had been invited to Bahrain to help with the security situation, stressed that “this is not Bahrain any more, it is Saudi Arabia.”

l ite ratu r e Although the literature on Bahrain’s political situation is relatively well articulated, the wider literature on Bahrain is rather limited, especially from a landscape and geographical perspective. Exceptions include Nelida Fuccaro’s aforementioned urban history of Manama, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf (2009) and Larsen’s Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (1983), which takes a biogeographical perspective and gives a fascinating account of the islands’ geography from ancient times to the present. The two edited volumes of Bahrain through the Ages (1986 and 1993) contain collections of essays on the history and archaeology of Bahrain. Clive Holes’s linguistic ethnography of the changes in Bahraini Arabic in light of modernization in the 1970s is especially illuminating from an anthropological perspective. Fuad Khuri’s Tribe and State in Bahrain (1980) and Mohammed Ghanim Rumaihi’s thesis on social and political changes since World War I (1975) were initially suppressed in Bahrain owing to their discussions of the workings of the state and Bahrain’s distinctive political system. Urban histories on Bahrain such as Fuccaro’s generally stop at 1971. Preindependence government records are housed in the British Archives in Kew outside London and are relatively easily accessed. Post-independence government records are much harder to find, not just because of language and secrecy laws but because of a lack of organization. A senior govern-

two seas, many greens

17

ment official told me that during a government ministry move, the ministry’s archives were left in boxes on the pavement outside for the movers to collect. Before the movers came, the boxes were instead picked up by the trash collectors and dumped, never to be recovered. No one knows exactly which records were lost. Overall, records were published only in Arabic from independence until about 1986, when they became bilingual. Apart from some local nuances, Bahrain is largely representative of current patterns of development in the Gulf. Little has been written about contemporary landscape in the Gulf, and scholars struggle to understand the nuances of contemporary Gulf urbanism. Exceptions are Yasser Elsheshtawy’s numerous writings on Gulf cities, Ahmed Kanna’s Dubai, the City as Corporation, Boris Brorman Jensen’s Dynamics of Bingo Urbanism, not to mention Al-Manakh and Al-Manakh Gulf Continued, the latter edited by Todd Reisz and OMA/AMO. Other studies include Pascal Menoret’s Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt, Toby Jones’s Desert Kingdom, and Christopher Davidson’s numerous publications on the Emirates.

goals and structure The eight chapters in the book are composed mostly of vignettes, some of which relate directly to one another and some that do not. What follows is an ethnography “progressing through accumulation,” to borrow a phrase from Albena Yaneva.38 The chapters depict the complex relationships between the color green and the social and physical infrastructures that sustain green in Bahrain’s arid built environment. Paradoxically, as noted, the creation of “green” in arid urban areas, such as Bahrain, is often not at all “green” from an environmental point of view, since over half the water of the Bahraini state is used to irrigate green space. The book highlights this paradox and explores the “green” landscapes of Bahrain, where green represents a plethora of implicit values and lives in dialectical tension with other culturally and environmentally significant colors and hues. Addressing these central shades, the book’s chapters focus on blue, red, date palm green, beige, bright green, and white, and their relationship to green and to each other.

18

introduction

Having described the framework for the book and why Bahrain was chosen as the focus of the study in the introduction, in Chapter 1 we see the complex interplay between the research methods—the aerial view and the walk—that informed so much of this work. It also outlines some of the challenges encountered in my field research. Chapter 2 outlines the infrastructure of blue in Bahrain’s built environment and the efficacy of blue in keeping the country green. Beginning with a description of the Bahraini light and the colors of the sea, from technical, historical, and social perspectives as well as my own observations, the chapter moves on to an analysis of water infrastructure and the politics of treated sewage effluent (TSE). Over half the water of the state is used in the irrigation of green space in Bahrain, an indication of the enormous value accorded to green. Red is the Bahraini national color; green is a color of Islam. Green and red in Bahrain, as well as in nearby Iran, are highly politicized colors. Red is often a substitute for green, as seen in the distaste for green shown by some Bahraini Sunnis (as opposed to Sunnis outside of Bahrain). Chapter 3 addresses red and how green has become red in Bahrain. There green is associated with the Shiʿa, and by extension, it has become a color of resistance to the Sunni-led state. Through a selection of vignettes, including ʿAshuraʾ, the religious festival, this chapter discusses how red can be green and sets up a dialogue between red and green. Chapter 4 focuses on the memory, the history, the color, and the “urbanism” of the green of the Bahraini date palm. The date palm is the most iconic Bahraini vegetation and one of the main sources of green on the islands. We see the historical power of green as articulated through the life cycle of the date palm, and how it is under threat from property developers who regard green as a disposable commodity. No area in the country shows the paradoxes of Bahrain’s greenery better than the Manama greenbelt, which is the focus of Chapter 5. The idea of preserving a green area situated west of the capital originated in the early 1970s. Most people seem resigned to the fact that despite intentions of protecting the greenbelt, the greenery will likely be depleted and replaced with new buildings. These new developments are still curiously colored green, however, often even greener than the palms they replace.

two seas, many greens

19

Chapter 6 is about the promise of green through beige. Desert plants, such as the spiky and leafless shrublet ʿA–gu–l (Alhagi maurorum), or al-ʿA–qu–l in standard Arabic, and Kaff Maryam (Anastatica hierochuntica), turn bright green after the spring rains, temporarily creating a green landscape that is otherwise beige, brown, or silver. This film of greenery that covers the desert so excites some Bahrainis that they call it jangily. Green is present in beige through its promise—a promise often fulfilled and maintained through water. The seventh chapter addresses newer and brighter hues of green. The gray-greens of the date palms, often considered old-fashioned, are being replaced by brighter hues of green as symbols of progress or of changing hegemonies. The chapter describes different conditions in Bahrain and the region with changing values of green. We see that advertisements often show more greenery than a project can deliver. Residents’ testimonies indicate that a major value of any development comes from the greenness that provides contrast to the indigenous desert landscape. The eighth chapter addresses white and its relationship to green. White is understood as the summation of all colors, rather than the absence of color. When designing with green, the charisma of the color needs to be guarded and well understood: the values need to be acknowledged, not just of green, but of its countless shades and hues. Implicit in the chapter is a call for a greater social component to design and for an awareness of color in the urban fabric, including not just green but other colors too. Woven throughout the chapters are interventions from my interlocutors. To protect their privacy, all names have been changed with the exception of a few public figures whose identities will be clear to anyone who knows them. Less famous are several of my close friends: Latif, Alireza, Isa, and Maryam. Latif, whom I first met in January 2008 by chance as I walked through the Manama suq, is now retired from the Shiʿa Waqf Directorate, where I would often visit him in his office. He is involved in a family decorating business and frequently visits Saudi Arabia and other GCC countries on business trips. Latif introduced me to his extended family, including his cousin Abbas and brother Mahmoud, and to the various maʾa–tim (Shiʿa religious houses) of Manama. In the process, Latif facilitated many fascinating

20

introduction

conversations and connections among the Shiʿa community. A pious bearded Shiʿi from a prominent family, Latif rises early to pray, and once or twice a year goes on pilgrimage to Mashhad in Iran or Karbala in Iraq, often with his wife, grown-up children, and other family members. Latif ’s family formerly lived in the suq but moved to the suburbs in the 1970s and built a house on a plot of land gifted from the prime minister. Latif has an incredibly calm demeanor; I saw this fractured only once, when his sons were jailed during the uprisings of 2011, part of the larger Arab Spring movement. The state quashed the uprisings and declared more than one period of emergency, and it was during one of these that Hamad and Ibrahim were incarcerated longterm, an event that has left Latif devastated, even now. Latif and I always meet over Persian food. Alireza, a historian from a prominent merchant family of Persian origin, is an astute observer of Bahrain and a critical commentator of contemporary events. Having seen Bahrain go through many phases of development, Alireza can recall with incredible detail the political and social history of the islands. His sharp memory is supported by a fascinating archive of historic documents and artifacts that recount a history sometimes at odds with the history books. From Alireza, I learned much about the social and political history of Manama and Bahrain, but also about customs, traditions, and people. We regularly met in the various coffeehouses of Manama where Alireza spends his days meeting with friends and colleagues. Isa, whose friendship extends since before my fieldwork, was the reason I focused on Bahrain. Isa represents a younger generation of Bahrainis. He is an interrogator of the past and the present, keen to bring about a more hopeful future. His own mixed Sunni and Shiʿi ethnic background makes him respectful of both traditions, allowing an always insightful and sometimes surprising worldview. Isa and I first met in the United States, and I began my fieldwork after he had returned to Bahrain to work for the government. While we would sometimes talk about my work, what I valued most in my relationship with Isa was that we would mostly simply hang out, and this relaxed friendship was and is very important for me and my research. We met in various locations: often at his house in Saar with his family for lunch, sometimes watching movies, or over candlelight suppers with his eclectic and always interesting friends. Sometimes Isa would collect me in Gufool where I lived, driving nonchalantly the wrong

two seas, many greens

21

way up the narrow, one-way side streets in a car much too wide to fit, oblivious to shouts in Bahraini Arabic of “Rung sayd!” (“You are driving in the wrong direction!”). Maryam is a vital but invisible interlocutor, whom I never describe directly in the book, although her presence is fairly constant throughout the narrative relating to the government. Foreign educated and from a Hawala (Sunni) family, Maryam worked for a government ministry and facilitated many connections and conversations for me. What impressed me most was that often she would coordinate my interlocutors from afar but not actually be part of the conversation, or even briefed on it afterward. Through her, my connections with the various ministries were affirmed and strengthened. Although unseen on the page, Maryam was an important interlocutor whose contributions remain firmly embedded between the lines.

1

Green Scenery the vertical and the horizontal The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. —Walter Benjamin

I arrived in Bahrain for my fieldwork on the eve of Eid al-Fitr, the festival of breaking the fast that marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. I had intended to be in Bahrain before then, in order to visit estate agents to find housing, but the taxi driver who drove me from the airport to the Oriental Hotel in the Manama suq announced gleefully that “Eid has just been declared!” The king, he told me, had declared Eid a day earlier than expected, following the first spotting of the moon marking the end of the Ramadan fast—Islam follows the lunar calendar. This meant five days of public holiday would follow, and significantly for me, real estate accommodation offices would be closed. I had decided early on not to live with expatriates or in an area that Western expatriates might normally choose, such as Juffair, Exhibition Road, or Budaiya. But it was impossible for me to find a place to live with a Bahraini family and to achieve the intimacy of living conditions that the ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski would advocate.1 After much searching though the Gulf Daily News and in the Internet cafés of Manama during Eid, I gave up on the idea and sublet a modest one-bedroom apartment from a French hairdresser, Philippe, who in turn rented the villa from a pilot in the king’s fleet. I found the apartment through an advertisement on Expatriates.com: 22

green scenery

23

1 b/room Flat attached to a private house for rent n nice area Manama. Description: Little sweet-home Flat with caracter in Manama (15 mns walking to souk) nice green area for 1 person, attatched to a private villa, with it’s private door. 1 b.room + separ.private shower & toilet & separate minikitchen with fridge/micro-wave/kettle/elec ring stove/crokery/cuttlery/new bed(130 cm)/T.V/internet(with an extra 20 bd/months on share)/little cute garden with pond. 200 bds/months (400 bhd every 2 months) all tax included (water and electricity and the 10 % municipality residential tax and the maintenance). [All sic; emphasis mine.]

I was intrigued and went to see it. The “nice green area” was the district of Gufool, just outside Manama and beside the Water Gardens, which had been “beautified” by Charles Belgrave some fifty years before. Belgrave was the British-born adviser to the ruler of Bahrain, and effectively prime minister, from 1926 to 1957. The location of the apartment allowed easy access by foot to Manama on one side and the greenbelt on the other; this centrality was important for my desire to walk everywhere I needed to go. Gufool itself is full of mid-twentieth-century villas and is laid out in a grid system. One can easily imagine the date palms that used to inhabit the site; clearly from its context, surrounded by date palm groves and former date palm groves, it was formerly a date palm plantation too, a busta–n. The apartment itself was directly above the hair salon serving female expatriates and sheikha–t, female members of the ruling family. “You look youngerrrrr!” became my morning wake-up call, as Philippe complimented his clients. After I moved in in early October, it became a priority for me to paint the yellow walls of the apartment white. Steven Caton did this during his fieldwork, as he reports in Yemen Chronicle, as a way of establishing his ownership over his place of abode.2 It took some time for the landlord to agree, but once the walls were white I realized the power of color to transform perception of space. The color had energized me for the task I had set myself.

the ministry When I entered Rashid’s office on my first day calling on the Ministry of Municipalities in Manama, on the desk on top of a pile of papers was a

24

chapter one

full-color printed version of a report widely available on the Internet. This report, made soon after Google Earth became available in Bahrain, compared areas of Bahrain with Bahraini royal properties and did not mince words. Comparing the densely populated capital city of Manama with the king’s private island—of exactly the same size as the capital—the anonymous author asked: “How many people live in Manama? And how many property owners are there? Who is allowed to enter the city? And what’s the density of its population?” It goes on to say, “Ask the same questions for this ‘Bahrain’ island over here!”3 The document, which was widely circulated by e-mail around the Gulf, contained screenshots made before Google Earth was banned in Bahrain (for a brief period, as it turned out). As one blogger put it, “Pamphleteering doesn’t get much more visceral than this (even if I have no easy way of verifying if it is true). If Bahrain’s government wants to prevent the spread of this kind of information, it will have to ban e-mail.”4 This report’s presence on a ministry desk indicated the seriousness with which online informal communication is taken. I had planned on working with the Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs. To access the archives of the ministry—or so I was told—I needed a formal job. My appointment to the Physical Planning Directorate was approved at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, went through the hierarchy, and I was told, sat in the minister’s inbox for most of a year. I had actually left Bahrain when I received a message that the ministry was looking for me to start work in its offices in an office building in the center of Manama called “Gold City.” The message was in the form of a voicemail inquiring as to my whereabouts as I had not shown up for work. By then I had met the then minister, who was Shiʿi, one evening at the Maʾtam Bin Rajab, his family maʾtam, at a celebration he had organized. Cattle and sheep were slaughtered on the street outside as offerings for the poor. This follows one of the foundational practices of Islam, zakat, or alms-giving and distribution of one’s wealth among the community. It was that evening, a couple of weeks before I finished my fieldwork, that I first met the minister in person and told him what I was doing. He told me to let him know if there was anything I ever needed or wanted. Soon after that, my appointment to the ministry was approved—through his generosity or merely slow coincidence I cannot say. I heard critique from several

green scenery

25

Sunnis in the ministry that the minister was only interested in helping the Baharna, an ethnic group I obviously am not a member of. During my year in Bahrain, officials at the ministry were most gracious and gave me desk space in the office, although without that formal job I could not have access to the official database. My time at the ministry allowed me to closely observe their ways of working and cultivate many conversations and indeed friendships. At first I would bring my notebooks so I could work at my desk and write up my fieldnotes but quickly found that I could not work when I went to the ministry; the days were taken up with people stopping by to chat and drink tea. Usually we would have lemon tea, made of black dried lemon and hot water with some honey. I had expected that the affiliation with the ministry would allow me greater access to information and people. In general, this was not the case. While I made many good friends through the ministry, it took a few weeks for me to realize that being attached to the ministry included both obligation toward the ministry and a bias, perceived or actual. And then there was the issue that the ministry was not really that powerful.5 In general I found that those in authority, while sympathetic to my presence—and this includes a friend from the royal family—did not seem used to being questioned about government policies. They either didn’t know the answers to my questions or did not want to tell me the answers, although no one ever actually said no. A couple of people who were especially sympathetic to my work explained that their willingness to open up to me was hampered by the fact that they feared giving out too much information might jeopardize their positions. “Do you want the official figure or the real figure?” was a regular question asked in the various ministries in response to my queries, and hardly anyone batted an eyelash at the irony of such a question being posed. Obtaining any sort of quantitative information could be taxing and frustrating. In one instance, at an unnamed institution, a senior figure explained to me that a huge discrepancy between the published figures and the reality originated from a desire to please the rulers. Once the rulers became aware of a figure, exaggerated by a civil servant to make himself and his team look better in the eyes of the authorities, the organization became trapped in a set of double figures. There were those figures

26

chapter one

that were presented to the rulers and those that were used within the organization to try to catch up with what they were declaring. Other sets of double figures persist more pervasively. When I inquired at a ministry in Manama about the square meters of green space in Bahrain, I was told that the official figure was both freely available and unreliable; meanwhile the real figure could only be obtained on my behalf through the written request of the president of my university to the minister. Furthermore, I was told that even if the president of Harvard wrote to the minister, she would probably not receive an answer. The complexities of the cultural conditions in Bahrain add to the complexities of gathering information. In general, I found that the majority Shiʿi population was receptive to my presence and much more open with me than were the Sunni-controlled ministries. As the literature on the urbanism of landscape was so thin for Bahrain, it became clear that the broad range of data I needed for this research project could be obtained only from a long-term period of ethnographic fieldwork. I would need extended engagement with the location and its people to gather the data, qualitative and quantitative, that I needed.

me tho d s Having secured funding for a year of fieldwork in Bahrain and the Gulf, I developed a schedule for the first few months. I wanted to confirm my plan’s usefulness and asked some eminent professors for guidance on my methodology. The professors told me, “Just do what you need to do.” In other words, don’t think too hard. It took me some time to realize and appreciate that this was not an evasion of the question but actually really good advice. I went to Bahrain and started doing. It was only when I was in the field, for instance, that I realized how important walking would be, as it increased the possibilities of serendipity that most anthropologists depend on and brought me into contact with many Bahrainis outside of my regular social orbit with whom I could engage. Once in the field, I found that even the best-laid plans did not always work out as hoped. I constantly had to improvise, to abandon work I had been doing, to keep multiple lines of inquiry open, and hardest of all, to be

green scenery

27

patient. One of the biggest challenges I faced was that things took time, although being Irish I was already used to “creative” schedules for things such as buses. When I asked an Irish bus driver once why the bus was always late, he quipped, “If we left on time, everyone would miss it.” The expression insha–llah (a colloquial form of in sha–ʾ Alla–h, meaning “God willing”) has many tonalities, each of which implies a different degree of commitment. Until I learned to appreciate and interpret the significance of these nuances, I found that the driver did not show up or promised meetings did not happen. The standard explanation for something not happening in the way that it was supposed to was that it couldn’t have been God’s will. God’s intentions, it turned out, can be somewhat anticipated by noticing the different emphases between insha–llah, insha–a–llah, and insha–a–a–llah. The longer the a–, the more likely something is to happen. My expectations for my time in Bahrain were to live among Bahrainis, to meet locals as much as possible, and to speak Arabic on a daily basis—a plan that turned out to be incredibly difficult for many reasons, never mind the fact that there are so many local social groups and voices to be heard. Bahrain’s polyvocality is evidenced by the plethora of accents in Bahrain; often they differ markedly even within families if children go to different schools or socialize with different social groups.6 I had a romantic notion similar to that of Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founders of ethnographic fieldwork, who advocates for an immersive experience but describes an easy division of observer from observed, which is not always so easy in the field. Malinowski writes that the proper conditions for ethnographic fieldwork “consist mainly in cutting oneself off from the company of other white men, and remaining in as close contact with the natives as possible, which can only be achieved by camping right in their villages.”7 Camping in Bahrain’s villages would be useful only if the villagers camped too. Most Bahrainis live behind high walls, and it is unusual for expatriates such as myself to be invited inside. The lack of interaction between Bahrainis and expatriates is often attributed to issues surrounding women and modesty, but clearly there is more to it than that. In any case, I was surprised at how isolated my life was from what I expected local life to be. It was not at all the experience I was expecting; indeed my day-to-day life was in general not that different from my existence in the United States. This was due both to the impenetrability of Bahraini

28

chapter one

society to expatriates and to the fact that the Bahraini lifestyle is in many respects quite westernized. So when I did get invited behind the high walls, I was sometimes surprised at how life within was not that different. When I met my Bahraini friends for lunch or dinner, I usually wanted to eat traditional Bahraini street food such as the most delicious local tikka—finely chopped cubes of lamb marinated overnight in dried lemon, which gives them a black color, and grilled on a skewer. It is eaten with fresh khubz (bread) and raw green onion leaves. My friend Isa, the U.S.educated civil servant with a deep love for Bahrain and Bahraini traditions, introduced me to “wa–h. id dı–na–r tikka” (wa–h. id means “one”; one dinar is about US$2.65). Except for Isa, my Bahraini friends and informants steered me toward fancy restaurants such as Monsoon, which they would describe as “the best Thai restaurant in Bahrain.” Indeed, on one occasion when I returned to Bahrain for a short trip, all I wanted was to go find tikka, whereas my friends wanted to go to a posh restaurant with “international cuisine,” which also included pork and alcohol. They probably thought I would enjoy that. They preferred to showcase their cosmopolitan bona fides, but all I wanted was Bahraini food. One of the few restaurants near my home was Dairy Queen, the U.S. fast-food restaurant, and although I initially tried to avoid eating there, I wound up being a regular customer known to the mostly Filipino staff. It had a largely student clientele, due to the proximity of the campus of AMA International University. Ali, a younger brother of my friend Isa, said he often went to Dairy Queen in the early hours of the morning with his friends. I did get invited into a few Bahraini homes during the course of the year, sometimes to a majlis and sometimes to the living area, depending on how traditional the family was. I was very fortunate in that Isa’s family regularly had me over for meals, including Friday lunch. Following Friday prayers, this was the main family meal of the week. Soon after I arrived in Bahrain, Umm Isa invited me over for Friday lunch. Umm means “mother of.” She told me to treat their home like my own. “This is your house,” she told me. “Come over whenever you feel like it. It is your home.” Umm Isa’s hospitality, I later learned, was not the norm, and it provided me with a welcome degree of security and stability in a sometimes harsh environment. Perhaps because they were of Persian descent, Friday lunch almost

green scenery

29

always included rice, yellow from saffron, mixed with pomegranates and crusted from oil on the bottom of the pan, as well as local fish such as ha–mu–r (grouper), chanʿad (mackerel), or s. a–fy (rabbitfish). Isa’s family home became a second home for me, and I spent many hours there, although the distance—on the other side of the island out of walking range from my lodgings—always made it a little bit hard to get to. My work became a multilayered ethnography, an ethnography based on seemingly disparate interviews and casual encounters, walking, photography, formal analysis of built projects, and some archival research. I studied green on a daily basis in public spaces, gardens, observing religious practices, government ministries, politics, and so forth. I would meet my core group of friends and informants on a regular basis, but they lacked social engagement with one another, and this led to a narrow, affiliation-based contact with the people I intended to study. In other words, I did not have access to any one preestablished community or wider extended family or group of friends in Bahrain; instead, I constructed my own. I interacted with a diversity of people and sites dispersed across the city, connected by green as discussed and practiced on a daily basis. I came to call this interaction multilayered ethnography.8 In due course, I decided to accept the unpredictability of life and to treat it as a positive thing rather than an inconvenience. It reminds me of one relative who says she makes no plans because when she does, they never turn out as planned, so she has learned not to make any plans. I learned not just to deal with chance and serendipity as they arose, responding passively to whatever was thrown at me, but to actively engineer the likelihood of chance occurrences. Here, walking became critically important. My whole year was informed by walking and by the routes I took. Walking for long distances, I should add, is not always easy in Bahrain during the daytime, due to the hot sun and a lack of pathways. I became a familiar sight to some interlocutors, who often told me that I was the only foreigner they saw walking around the island. I do not want to overly romanticize the power of walking, although it became an essential part of my method, since I do not drive and public transport can be confusing in Bahrain. Daytime walking in Bahrain is delightful for more than six months of the year, from October to March or April; the

30

chapter one

oppressive summer heat can make it very difficult, though. That’s why I did many of my walks after dark. *

*

*

My fieldwork carried with it several methodological points relating to the gathering of data, interviews, and my own access and sense of belonging. For example, I was not expecting to have much interaction with expatriates, but they were an important constituency for engagement. Alfie was a destitute British-born expatriate who somehow fell through a gap in the system that encourages expatriates to leave Bahrain once they reach the age of retirement. Alfie found himself in his eighties, out of work and not wanting to die in Bahrain. I met him at Nirvana, an Indian restaurant in the suq where I liked to eat my lunch, usually green pea masala, extra spicy. The clientele included mostly Indian expatriate businessmen. The price of about 900 fils (US$2.50) for a lunch was high, but it seemed clean. That is why I chose to eat there the first time, and I returned often. Alfie was the only other white person I met in Nirvana. Seated at an adjacent table, he joined me and talked at length. Alfie had one son in Berlin and another in Bangkok, and was trying to decide where to spend his final years. He had previously worked in the film industry, including one stint in Hong Kong working with Sean Connery. We talked about language and accents. Alfie told me that the worst English accent he ever heard was among housewives in coffee shops in Saar: what he described as a mix of a bland expatriate twang and a frontal Essex accent from outside London. Saar is an area to the west of Bahrain where expatriates live in villas on land that was, until recently, desert or date palm groves. A couple of weeks later, I told Isa, who lived in Saar, about my conversation with Alfie. While Isa agreed about the accents, he casually asked if I had written about this encounter in my fieldnotes. I was surprised to realize that I had not. “Why?” asked my friend. “Is it because he is English?” I had to agree. Alfie did not matter to me because he was English. After my meeting with Alfie, I listened much more closely to what non-Bahrainis told me. Bahrain’s polyvocality was not something I was prepared for. Language also presented a problem. The Arabic classes I had taken equipped me with skills in written and spoken Modern Standard Arabic,

green scenery

31

useful for eyeing documents at the ministries or skimming the newspapers. Arabic helped me among the Baharna, a social group that I really only started meeting later on, during the ʿAshuraʾ religious festival. The governing classes were my primary interlocutors at first. Bahrain’s business language is English, most people speak English, and the people I encountered in my everyday life—such as the laundryman, the tailor, and Mr. Kareem from the corner store (called barra–da, “cold store” in Bahrain), who hailed from Kerala, which he said was very green—usually spoke English to me, their native language being Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, or Tagalog. So, Arabic was in fact of limited use, and those who spoke Arabic would find my Arabic “charming” and insist on speaking English to me for anything meaningful. I lived and conducted fieldwork in Bahrain primarily during 2007 and 2008 and made several field visits before and after this time.9 A few books I was reading at the time were especially influential in my thinking. First, I incorporated methods such as those found in Farha Ghannam’s Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo, an ethnography about a new housing development constructed on the edge of Cairo.10 Like Ghannam, I had the luxury of a year of fieldwork in one place. I also embraced the multilayered strategy of Diane Singerman and Paul Amar’s Cairo Cosmopolitan, a collection of essays that I came to regard as almost a “multiauthored” ethnography of Cairo.11 I was also inspired by the combination of written and visual narrative in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, in that Pamuk’s text is punctuated with melancholy historic photographs that, rather than illustrating facts, add to the mood and atmosphere of the book. I also closely consulted Steven Caton’s Yemen Chronicle, an “ethnomemoir” of his fieldwork in Yemen.12 Caton’s book, written twenty years after his original fieldwork, prepared me for some of the challenges of the field and what some might call the fieldwork blues.13 It was comforting to know of someone else’s struggles, emotional and practical, with being in the field. I tried, for instance, to emulate Caton and maintain both analytic fieldnotes and a personal journal but was unable to maintain this duality, focusing instead on fieldnotes. Caton finds his journal a useful comparative tool to read in conjunction with his notes. I have found this more personal aspect represented in e-mails I sent to friends from the field, which became an important source for me as I analyzed my time in Bahrain.

32

chapter one

Predominantly, I follow the more traditional fieldwork of ethnographers like Ghannam, inasmuch as I was based in one site, and my notes are informed not just by what people said to me but also by the place as well as my personal bias.14 Yet my research differs from Ghannam significantly in two ways. The scale of the location is bigger: Bahrain is a nation-state of some seven-hundred-plus square kilometers, much larger than a single housing development on the fringes of Cairo.15 But of more significance is that Ghannam had intimate contact with a family and social group with whom she spent most of her time and interacted with almost daily on a deep personal level. Ghannam spent her time embedded within a preexisting community that intimately informed her ethnography. If I had done this, my study would have been very different, perhaps an ethnography of green among one social group—say, the Baharna, or among the ʿAjam, or Keralites, or Western expatriates—rather than an ethnography based on a color across the whole city-state of Bahrain. *

*

*

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures, suggests that loci cannot be taken as objects of ethnographic research, stating that “anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods); they study in villages.”16 This line of argument ignores the fact that objects and things may have a “social life” too, and as anthropologists move beyond the study of people to the study of the relationality of things, an extensive body of literature emerges on the social life of nonhumans such as trees, movies, and everyday objects.17 Geertz tells us elsewhere: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.”18 In a similar vein, this book began as a study of green in Bahrain, where the color is an object, and evolved into an ethnographic study of landscape in Bahrain through the lens of color. Critically speaking, landscape comprises land and the people who inhabit the land, as well as the relationships between them.19 While it might seem strange that an assemblage of relationships could be considered an interlocutor, others might agree that the landscape has the loudest voice of all. One of the ways that landscape speaks to us is through color. For example, a brown, dried-out lawn could

green scenery

33

be saying it is thirsty, a gray-green, thriving date palm grove that it is content, and an evening red sky that a good day will follow.20

wa l kin g In the year of my fieldwork in Bahrain, my goal was to walk everywhere I needed to go. If landscape is the object, it is obvious that one needs to be in it. When one is inside or in a car, one is removed from the tactility of the landscape. In addition, when one walks, one has chance encounters in a way that does not happen in a car. Walking increases the opportunities for meeting people, and also for finding the unexpected and the strange. Ultimately, my goal was to make the strange familiar, to borrow from the oft-quoted phrase.21 It is a phrase often used to explain anthropology: in making the strange familiar, and the familiar strange, we come to new knowledge regarding social patterns and relationships. Having decided on the necessity of walking, my next and more difficult question was where to walk. I struggled with the routes for my walks. Does one just take the lines as drawn on the map? Does one use the seemingly arbitrary lines reflecting roads, laneways, and property boundaries? Or does one draw one’s own line and follow that? Either way, I was thinking in lines. I was looking for patterns of green and landscape, and I thought the line would help to give structure to my walks. Inspired by the land artist Richard Long, I first drew ten straight lines running from the east to the west of Bahrain and determined that I would walk these straight lines, one per week.22 The lines would cross various types of properties: public, private, wasteland, agricultural land, private housing, schools, and cemeteries, many of which are crisscrossed by walls, roads, and paths. Walking these lines would not be intuitive or even necessarily legal; the aim was to enter diverse places that I might not normally encounter or might avoid. I expected to be introduced to people, landscapes, and green that I would not otherwise have access to. I would create something new in the process, connecting disparate parts via the lines I would draw on the map and walk by foot. While walking, I would record visually and with

34

chapter one

fieldnotes my interactions with green along the way. Another schema for conducting my fieldwork could have been to throw beans on a map and to go to the points on which the beans fell. A method inspired by Raoul Bunschoten and CHORA, the London-based design practice, this would at least in theory introduce a random sampling into the equation, also bringing me to places I might not normally visit. I did not follow either of these plans, not just for reasons of practicality and to avoid drawing too much attention to myself; my focus on green rendered these map-based schemata superfluous. The line was a distraction from the green. Instead, I followed green. I had a number of methods for choosing the routes I would walk, and the aerial image coupled with intuition played the biggest part in selecting my routes. Basically, I walked wherever I needed to go. If I was going to a ministry in Manama to discuss green, I would walk for thirty minutes through the suq to get there. I recorded my interactions with green along the way, taking photographs and writing scratch notes in my pocket-size notebook and methodically noting details not just of the green but people’s reactions to it as well. This meant starting conversations with strangers and being receptive to strangers starting conversations with me. The suq is not the greenest location, but still I would note the green vegetables being sold, the green winter thiya–b for sale in the tailor’s, the green hubs on the car parked along the sidewalk, the green weeds poking through the pavement, the mashmu–m (sweet basil) for sale at the cemetery on a Thursday evening. If I had to go to the ministry the following day, I would take a slightly different route. Other times, I had to go farther than I could walk. On these occasions I would take a public bus, or Illias, my landlord’s driver, would drive me. I followed the patches of green and the corridors I used to get there. I used the aerial image to help myself find the green areas, and I would set off to see those areas. In many ways my routes became a complex interplay between Google Earth, which guided me, and the beholding of green scenery as seen from eye level. Rarely did my walks turn out as expected. This book is based on a year of living and walking in Bahrain. The method of walking is fundamental to my understanding of Bahrain and intended to supplement rather than replace aerial reconnaissance, which was also an important tool in the research.23 Peripatetics such as Francesco Careri, founder of the Italian Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade urban art

green scenery

35

workshop, describe walking “as a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory.”24 For me, the approach was much more pragmatic and designed to gather ethnographic data through the encounters I had with people, land, and color. I met many of my friends and interlocutors through walking, Latif being the most notable.

ab s tra cti on a n d a e r i a l In their epic The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day, Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe position together one of Ian McHarg’s maps of Philadelphia with a Jackson Pollock painting.25 McHarg, a professor of landscape architecture and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, was known for his large-scale layered maps, which identified and separated various aspects of landscape such as soils, hydrology, and so forth. Although the Jellicoes do not directly explain the relationship between the two images, the juxtaposition implies that spatial designers should take inspiration from the abstract arts (and vice versa), although the Jellicoes are careful to acknowledge that such interpretation is personal to every author. Concerned that humankind is moving into a phase where traditional understandings of space and time are no longer valid or in fact relevant, the Jellicoes advise their readers to look to the arts for a vision of the future, “gaining confidence in the knowledge that the abstract art that lies beyond all art lives a life of its own independent of time and space.”26 This particular juxtaposition of McHarg and Pollock, the colors and application of the paint on the canvas informing how we read and live in the contemporary city, was the underlying inspiration for this book. Reading the aerial image of Bahrain as a painting, I was able to abstract the land use from the particular geography, infrastructure, or element of landscape. Then, in addressing the color, I got a different view of the city than had I focused on the land use itself. The aerial view shows landscape in a certain nakedness. Stretching back to Le Corbusier’s fascination with the aerial image, since the rise of mass availability of aerial photography and indeed more recently Google Maps, Google Earth, and NASA images, designers have

36

chapter one

become used to reading the city as a collection of physical artifacts. There are many attempts at classification of the components of the city, such as Kevin Lynch’s “paths, nodes, districts, points and landmarks” and Stan Allen’s “points and lines.”27 Richard T. T. Forman has a particular classification of landscape from the point of view of landscape ecology. For Forman, if people drop from a helicopter onto a city (again the aerial image is invoked), they will land on one of three components: a patch, a corridor, or the matrix. The matrix is the space that holds the patches and corridors together.28 Thus, a city might be read as a collection of recognizable patches like houses, parks, and gardens; connected by corridors of infrastructures of roads, streets, and sidewalks; and all organized in a matrix, which are the leftover spaces that hold everything together in one (arguably) larger ecological system.29 The fascination with aerial photography has rightly permeated the design and ecological disciplines and offers an incredible tool to attempt to understand escalating urbanization and emergent urban, suburban, and exurban forms. Ian McHarg was of course an early pioneer, in Design with Nature. McHarg’s layered maps were a radical departure in their day and were primarily rational and scientific in their evaluations.30 More recently, Charles Waldheim has been a vocal advocate of the importance of the aerial image. For Waldheim, aerial images make possible a new understanding of urbanism as a “flatbed terrain” and “horizontal surface.” Waldheim writes: “New audiences and sites for work also offer the possibility of new formulations of landscape, recasting its image from green scenery beheld vertically to a flatbed infrastructure that includes both natural and urban environments.”31 Waldheim challenges us to change our perspective on landscape from the traditional notion of green scenery seen at eye level toward one of landscape as a horizontal surface that makes no distinction between urban and rural, landscape and urbanism. This book began as an attempt to describe the urbanism of landscape—as green scenery beheld vertically—in large part in response to the above quotation. In demonstrating the urban qualities of landscape, the aim is to take a slightly different approach to landscape urbanism, a disciplinary realignment including an influential body of literature and professional projects that have originated since the late 1990s. A basic tenet of landscape urbanism, again to quote Waldheim, is that “landscape replaces

green scenery

37

architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.”32 Combining fieldwork—the vertical—with the aerial image (the horizontal) allows the opportunity for a “thicker” reading of a landscape, and therefore is positioned to propose “thicker” solutions that might ultimately be more successful.33 (I should stress, however, that there is no linear relationship between fieldwork and proposition, as ethnography and design have very different epistemologies.) As the landscape ecologist Richard T. T. Forman affirms, “Of course, dropping from the sky to examine the land closely is also essential.”34 For Forman, landscapes as read from an airplane are almost always a mosaic, and mosaics, as he points out, are colored.35 Yet as Walter Benjamin reminds us, the power of a country road—and presumably a city one too—is greater when walking through it than when looking at it from above. Benjamin offers more detailed advice, which Hugh Raffles quotes in his book In Amazonia: A Natural History, which he claims is “less a history of nature than a way of writing the present as a condensation of multiple natures and their differences.”36 Benjamin’s quote is as follows: The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushed through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front.37

The vertical transect allows for a more intimate and nuanced reading of landscape than we can get from aerial images alone. “Get out now. Not just outside, but beyond the trap of the programmed electronic age,” urges John R. Stilgoe in Outside Lies Magic, a wonderful reading of the American landscape. Stilgoe urges the reader to “Walk. Stroll. Saunter. Ride a bike, and coast along a lot. Explore.”38 A city from above may look gray; from inside it can be dazzling in its colors: think of Times Square or Shinjuku. Indeed, when walking through the city, as the Urban Earth, a UK-based geography collaborative, do, it can be surprising how much

38

chapter one

green there is in the city outside the official category of green space. Why not behold landscape from both perspectives, from above and from eye level too? Large-scale geographies need to be understood ethnographically if we are not to lose touch with the people in those geographies. Although the word geography, like landscape, is concerned with space and territory, geography differs from landscape in three significant ways. The first is inherent in the etymology of the word: geo-graphy means writing about the land as it is, recording its features and uses, whereas landscape overtly indicates a visual component. A second significant difference is the issue of scale: geography is not really tied to any one scale in the way a landscape is, or in the spatially hierarchical way the design disciplines are structured, from the broadest regional planning, to urban design, to landscape architecture, to architecture, to garden design, to interior design, and finally product design, all having a particular scalar focus.39 We live in a multiscalar world—where the earth is not necessarily getting smaller, or bigger, just both—and geography liberates us from scale in a way that promises fresh insights into the study of that land. Aerial photography is a means to understanding that multiscalar end. Lastly, and significantly, geography inherently implies a social component. I suggest that designers need to rediscover people, and that ethnography offers a set of skills to engage with people.

d es i g n a n t h r op o lo g y This multi-disciplinary book sits within the emerging field of design anthropology. More than the study of design process, it is an attempt to shift the focus from anthropological description toward action.40 In this sense, design anthropology responds to a critique of contemporary anthropology that, Borneman and Hammoudi assert, identifies three denials in the field. This critique maintains “that ethnography is a literary genre which denies itself as such; that reliance on observation leads to a denial of the role of the ethnographer in shaping the object/subject studied; and that ethnographers tend to deny the constructed character of their objects and of the knowledge they produce from the initial period of fieldwork, through to the writing of their essays and books.”41 I am par-

green scenery

39

ticularly interested in the idea that the agency of ethnography be used in the design process itself, rather than as a retrospective tool. The emerging literature on the field includes the impressive ethnography of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design by Albena Yaneva, published in 2009 (and dedicated to Bruno Latour). Yaneva, in a subsection headed “Why stories?”—presumably preempting the question “Why ethnography?”—says: “This writing strategy aims at creating a reflexive text by trying to direct attention to the reader himself, to his own life and experience as a designer.”42 Dori Tunstall writes on what design anthropology can add to a design practice: “Design anthropology is an interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand the role of design artifacts and processes in defining what it means to be human (e.g., human nature). It is more than lists of user requirements in a design brief, which makes it different from contextual inquiry, some forms of design research, and qualitative focus groups. Design anthropology offers challenges to existing ideas about human experiences and values.”43 In the concluding chapter to her ethnography of design at OMA, Albena Yaneva suggests that the product of design has become disconnected from the conditions of its making and the design experiences of its makers. Thus, we can appreciate a building without knowing anything about its design process, but you cannot understand that building without considering design experiences.44 Yaneva’s ethnography opens up a provocative critique of the architectural design process. The challenge and potential lie in consciously using ethnography as part of a design process— in the actual shaping of space—rather than using it to only interpret or critique design. And doing so necessitates the beholding of green scenery vertically as well as horizontally.

2

The Blueness of Green infrastructures of sky and water Lot of sailing dhows off the coast, and water near the shore which was coloured every shade of blue and green and purple. —Charles Dalrymple Belgrave

“There’s mercy in it,” said Bernardo, speaking of the Bahraini light. Bernardo, a Lebanese-born photographer, lives and works in a 1950s villa across the street from where I lived in Gufool, the “nice green area” on the edge of Manama. We were discussing what differentiates the light in Bahrain from elsewhere in the Gulf. For Bernardo, the distinctive light is one of the reasons he based his twenty-year career as a photographer in Bahrain. “It’s easy to work in,” he told me, explaining that even at its most intense, the Bahraini light is not nearly as harsh as it can be elsewhere in the Gulf. We disagreed, however, on the advantages of the afternoon light. Late afternoon is my favorite part of the day in Bahrain. As the strong sun falls into a slumber, my light skin is less prone to being burned; hence it was at that time that I would go out and walk and explore Bahrain, and that was when most of my photographs were taken. For me the golden afternoon light is more conducive to photography too, offering softer and more saturated tones. For Bernardo, the waning afternoon light is often “too yellow” for successful photography.1 Bernardo prefers the ascending sun of the late morning for his work. Maybe this is why Bernardo is a professional photographer and I am not, but Fuad Khuri, the Lebanese anthropologist who worked extensively on Bahrain, might agree with me. 40

the blueness of green

41

Writing about what is distinct about Bahrain, Khuri preferred the light in the early morning or afternoon: “The charm of nature in Bahrain, and throughout the Arabian Desert, is best seen at dawn or dusk, when the sun touches the earth most gently.”2 Landscape historian John R. Stilgoe told me a story of how in the 1950s a member of the Bahraini ruling family, a keen amateur photographer, could not find a satisfactory film for working in Bahrain among the range of film then commercially available. The sheikh contacted Kodak about this problem and somehow convinced them to manufacture a film more suitable to Bahrain’s light and, I presume, extreme heat. The story goes that Kodak obliged and developed a film specially adapted for use in Bahrain.3 Is the light in Bahrain really so distinct as to merit its own photographic film? Alireza, who knows Bahrain well and introduced me to many of its stories and traditions, asked me, “Why is it that the greens of the date palms in Dubai are so different from the green of the date palms in Bahrain?” Alireza was referring to the date palms grown along the highways, planted by the ministries. Alireza explained that in contrast to Bahrain, “in Dubai the green is like fresh-painted green.” Others had raised this issue, comparing Dubai’s bright greens to Bahrain’s gray greens, so it is a relevant observation. My first response was to assume that Bahrain and Dubai use different species of date palms, but they do not. The palms are mostly of the same species—the poorer fruiting Phoenix dactylifera cv. Sefri (which has yellow fruit) and Phoenix dactylifera cv. Khasab (bearing red fruit)—originating in similar plant nurseries in Saudi Arabia, and sometimes Oman, and occasionally imported from California. Later, on visiting Dubai for an extended period, I concluded that one of the reasons for this differentiation in shade is probably the light. Dubai’s light differs from the more diffused Bahraini light, thereby leading to brighter colors in the vegetation. Nevertheless, if the light is different in Bahrain, why is that so? Some people, Alireza among them, say this distinction is because Bahrain is an island, and the intensity of the light and the colors the light animates are amplified due to the humidity generated by the surrounding sea. The distinctive light may indeed be partly attributable to Bahrain’s relative humidity: although on January 1 Bahrain and Dubai have similar average daily high humidities (approximately 89 percent versus 91 percent), in the

42

chapter two

summer months Bahrain averages a daily high of approximately 78 percent and Dubai 88 percent.4 This variation would not seem to be so significant as to merit a significant change in hue. However, colors are relative, and the hues of green depend not just on the light but also on the colors of the sky and the surroundings. Dubai’s plethora of contemporary urban developments, often seen in conjunction with its greens, could be one of the factors that make Dubai’s greens seem greener.5 The mist, said Bernardo, which sometimes gathers in pockets over the landscape in Riffa in the center and Budaiya to the west, also softens the light, especially in the early mornings and late evenings. There is also the sensitive and paradoxical issue of air pollution. Hidd Island, the industrial area on the east coast—often called the most polluted area in Bahrain, with allegedly a significantly higher incidence of cancers than elsewhere on the archipelago—has a distinctive quality of light and sea color. From certain angles, looking from the mainland, some can discern a fine yellow haze above Hidd. This yellow (rather than golden) light is as beautiful as it is sinister.

sk y The sky is all-important when you are on a flat island. In the 1760s, the Swiss geologist and explorer Horace-Bénédict de Saussure developed a cyanometer, literally a “measurer of blue,” to measure the blueness of the sky. The color wheel had fifty-two shades of blue, and these were used to measure the intensity of the sky’s blueness. The cyanometer verified that the sky is darker in midday than it is in the morning and the evening. Also, the sky appears darker from higher altitudes, a phenomenon that Götz Hoeppe, the environmental anthropologist, tells us may first have been recorded by Ibn al-Biruni, the explorer who had tried to climb the highest mountain in Persia, Mount Damavand.6 The geographer Alexander von Humboldt was enamored with the instrument, taking frequent measurements in his Atlantic voyage and Latin American explorations. In due course, Humboldt came to realize the shortcomings of such a quantitative measure. Varying illumination levels made it impossible to have a standard measurement between different locations, and the

the blueness of green

43

color of the sky is influenced by particles that are not recorded by the cyanometer.7 Blue is the mean background color for everyday lives, consistent across social classes and publics, seen from the city as well as the house. “A courtyard can be understood as a window to the sky,” as Hashim Sarkis puts it.8 The traditional courtyard house in Bahrain was traditionally white and constructed from coral. The color of the sky was the only color seen from the house, as the windows faced the courtyard, and the four surrounding walls symbolized the four columns carrying the dome of the sky.9 The sky could be blue, gray, black, or indeed yellow from sandstorms. It was traditional in Bahraini houses to have a tree in each courtyard. This tree would have its own personality and name, and produced the most prized dates reserved for the most important guests. The olive green of the date palm, seen against the changing sky, would often be the only constant color in the courtyard. Sarkis points out that the courtyard focuses the orientation of the dwelling internally by carving out a random chunk of sky. Thus the date palm would usually be seen against a background of sky. Alireza mentioned that fourteen years before, when he built his house, his date palm was the height of one man. “Now,” he said, “it’s the height of three men, and I can’t reach the dates.” Traditionally, buildings never had a window onto the street from the ground floor, because that was where the heat accumulated, and windowless walls prevented heat from coming into the house. In current discussions of sustainability, this could be considered a desirable feature for reducing temperatures and energy consumption, an environmental concern connected to the visual and the social. Second-floor windows were considered good, however. The philosopher William Gass writes that blue and green have the greatest emotional range of all colors. As a result of this range, Gass goes on to recommend: “Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet thick dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.”10 Although associated with a wide variety of climates, the courtyard is most common in arid regions. One wonders how much the blueness is implicated in this association between the courtyard house and the

44

chapter two

surrounding aridity. Is the courtyard with its upward gaze an attempt to forget the desert landscape outside? Gass goes on to refer to blue as a state of being: “Thus just as seeing blue involves a comparison between longer and shorter wavelengths over a total visual field, being blue consists of a set of comparisons too.”11 We are all aware of being in a state of the “blues,” but the feelings induced by blue are more often than not relaxing, reassuring, and contemplative, and fairly widespread. The artist Wassily Kandinsky writes that “the deeper the blue, the more it summons man into infinity, arousing his yearning for purity and ultimately transcendence. Blue is the typical celestial color. Blue very profoundly develops the element of calm.”12 At a lecture by the garden designer Madison Cox during the Bahrain International Garden Show, which was attended by Sheikha Sabika, wife of King Hamad, I learned of a special shade of blue, Majorelle Blue, from Yves Saint Laurent’s garden in Marrakech. There, the incredibly intense blue, one of the bluest blues I have ever seen, was selected as a background against which to see the green vegetation. Blue can be the framework through which to see the green.

se a The color of the sky impacts the color of the sea. Although the “Green Sea” around Bahrain is composed of an array of hues, pushing the boundaries of what can be considered green, fishermen invariably report that the various hues Charles Belgrave witnessed in the sea—“every shade of blue and green and purple”—are no longer as varied or as intense as they were in Belgrave’s day.13 These changes in the intensity of the colors are often attributed to disturbances of the seabed and the currents that contribute to the array of hues. The changes are amplified by the dredging and construction taking place as part of the billions of dinars of investment in reclamation and infrastructural projects in the sea off the north and east coasts. These developments, with artificial islands and dredging, replace the shallow zone between land and sea where it can be hard to distinguish between the two. Poets speak about this interstitial coastal zone between land and sea, the sa–h. il or sı–f, a zone so slight that “small fish can find no space in which to make a turn.”14 In describing how unsuitable the

the blueness of green

45

Bahraini water was for bathing, James Hamad Dacre Belgrave, Charles’s son, said it was so shallow you had to go far out to get enough depth for swimming.15 Inevitably, the question arises: Where does the land stop and the sea begin? One can only imagine what future poets will come to write about the reclamation projects that replace this shallow zone of neither land nor sea. Perhaps they will question the loss of the diversity of colors in the sea and draw connections between the color and environmental health—or will they marvel at the new developments currently under construction? If water is clear, then how does the sea take its blue color? Why is it that the sea appears blue, turquoise, or even green, sometimes even changing in front of our eyes? Why is it that when looked at from above, the sea appears darker than when viewed in perspective? The hue of the sea depends on various factors, including the angle of the sun, the intensity of the light, the shifting cloud cover, the depth of the water, the surface of the seabed, the water’s contents, and the distance from which you view it. Indeed, with the filtering of the clouds, the sea can sometimes change color rather dramatically. Alireza told me that in the past “there was shallow water and deep water,” and that you could swim in the sea with only a very slight irritation to the eyes (in other words, the sea was not very salty). After a hundred meters, according to Alireza, the water became deep blue, while the color of the water nearer the coast depended on whether the seabed was sandy (based on coral) or brown. In certain areas one could see algae.16 Franz Boas, one of the founders of ethnography as a method and often referred to as a father of American anthropology, wrote his doctoral dissertation, “Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water,” at the University of Kiel, Germany, in 1881. In the short thesis of sixty or so pages, submitted to the Physics Department, Boas specifically addresses the impact of light on water: “In fact, the light that generates the perception of color always consists of three parts: the part that sits on the surface of the water, the water itself, and the part of the light that reflects from the ground.”17 These components, Boas observed, are in turn affected by multiple factors, for example the source of the light and the character of the water. The depth of the water is highly significant since the light reflected from deeper layers of water has farther to travel and therefore its color is

46

chapter two

radically different. Then there is the question of the movement of water and the clouds above. The purely scientific approach of Boas’s contributions and the inability of physics alone to adequately describe the color of water led Boas to examine other qualitative methods that eventually led to the refinement of ethnography as a method.18 At certain times of the day and year, the sea between Manama and Muharraq (or what is left of it following the sea reclamation projects), as well as the turquoise of the sea around Hidd and Sitra—islands off the northeast coast—is gem-like. The golden late afternoon light, like the early morning light, shows the sea at its most radiant. The sea at Amwaj Island, the artificial island off the coast of Muharraq, because it is kept so clean, is likewise a very seductive turquoise, albeit a monotone. The intensity of the hues of the turquoise sea is related to the tranquility and shallowness of the water in these places. I cannot, however, say it is a sign of a healthy sea; it is rather a stagnant void, with a seabed cleared of seaweed and stones. To the fisherman, who because of land reclamation projects has to go farther and farther out into the sea to fish, the turquoise is perhaps not quite as beautiful. It is certainly not so beautiful for the fish, who do not venture into these monotone waters. Turquoise is a popular color for the tiles that cover the domes of Persian mosques and maʾa–tim and suggests that some of the efficacy of blue green can be attributed to its symbolic appeal in the Islamic tradition and to its adornment of “oasis” cities all over the eastern Islamic world.19 The turquoise of the tiles predates industrial manufacture and comes from a combination of roasted copper, lead, tin, and cobalt.20 Ellen Meloy, the desert writer, reports that turquoise is “the stone that strengthens the Persians, the desert dweller’s equivalent of a bulletproof vest against pain or demonic influences.”21

f r es hwater Groundwater is the only naturally occurring source of water in Bahrain; there are no rivers or surface water (except during the very occasional floods). Before 1925, when the drilling of artesian wells began—indirectly leading to the discovery of oil—Bahrain depended entirely for its freshwa-

the blueness of green

47

ter on about fifteen land- and twenty offshore-springs—known by the name chawchab, the colloquial pronunciation of kawkab, literally “planet.” Water was so plentiful in Bahrain in those years that there is a story that Abu Dhabi used to import freshwater by boat from Bahrain. “This was before oil,” emphasized my expatriate source, highlighting the fact that time is often measured from the discovery of oil. The second sea, the network of freshwater springs, gushed up through the seabed and the land. Charles Belgrave describes in his memoirs how pearl divers would collect water in leather waterskins from the freshwater springs that perforate the seafloor around Bahrain. This “sweet water” was sold in the suqs of the main settlements of Manama and Muharraq.22 Indeed the sweet water is often attributed as the reason for the distinct luster on Bahraini pearls, a luster that once drove up the price of those pearls, which are now rare. There is also a belief that the pearls were more plentiful close to where the springs gushed out into the sea.23 People often say that the springs added to the mystique and variety of the hues of blue and green and purple. Since the springs have been depleted or dried up totally, the sea has an altogether different palette of colors. The colors of the sea are an indication of its health: the more varied, the more life is in it. The freshwater sea also perforated the Bahraini land and sustained a thriving agriculture for millennia. The water is disseminated to farms and gardens, and consequently greenery, by way of qanawa–t (singular qana–), which are large-scale irrigation channels of Iraqi and Persian origin that are fed by the springs.24 Historically, Bahrain had a regional importance far disproportionate to its land mass, and this power was largely attributed to the availability of freshwater, which sustained a landscape that provided food as well as shelter from the harsh sun and the dusty desert winds. As Andrew Wheatcroft writes, “Upon that ample supply of fresh, sweet water, was built the culture and urban life of the island.”25 Ain Qasari’s popular name, ʿAyn al-Dubiyya, takes its name from the washing of clothes, for instance (ʿayn is “spring” in Arabic, plural ʿuyu–n). These springs were so potent— and such a contrast to the harsh surrounding climate—that many people considered them miracles sent from God to irrigate the desert. Some of the Bahraini springs, such as Ain Adhari, the Virgin’s Spring, became places of pilgrimage not just among Bahrainis but for people from all over

48

chapter two

the Gulf. Although often associated with Mary, the mother of Jesus, Alireza maintains that Ain Adhari takes its name from a young woman who committed suicide on account of being unable to marry the man she loved. It is said that the underground spring at Ain Adhari was so powerful that people were swirled around with the force of the water gushing up from the earth below. Writing in 1988, Andrew Wheatcroft said the force was by then much diminished because of the water being siphoned off for other purposes.26 Today the freshwater spring has dried up completely. A pond is maintained there in its memory in what is now an amusement park that has significant popular appeal. Ain Adhari now sits amid “Groovy Town,” the “Discovery Village,” and the food court.

wate r us e Before artesian wells, desalination, and treated sewage effluent (TSE) became the norm for water supply in Bahrain, the locations of the date palm groves indicated the presence of the springs and the channels that distributed the water. The springs dotted the north and west coasts—as well as the seabed—and their presence was roughly contiguous with the presence of human habitation and greenery. The springs fed the irrigation channels, from which the distribution of water was governed by strict customary irrigation laws and regulations. In fact, the north of Bahrain was covered by a network of afla–j (singular falaj) and qanawa–t, and regulations for the distribution of the water ensured equal access to water for the farmers. These regulations were only formalized in the 1940s and 1950s.27 “The custom law was always adjudicated by the religious leader in the village. Villagers were always Baharna,” Alireza told me. The customary watering laws were hundreds of years old and passed down by oral tradition until some of them were written up in the mid-twentieth century, containing very detailed rules for irrigation. For example, a deed (housed in the Bahrain National Museum) for a garden bought in 1587, states that “to water the land it should be from sunrise to noon on Sunday. And on Tuesday from sunrise to noon. And on Friday from noon until the light starts coming out from the East” (i.e., until first light on Saturday morn-

the blueness of green

49

ing). The water channel was often, but not always, the boundary of the property. The complex watering system regulated by the detailed customary irrigation laws is in decline. Once the system gets interfered with, the whole system is impacted. A garden’s irrigation can be affected by an intervention many miles away. One farmer neglecting his irrigation can affect the flow, life, and greenness of faraway date palm groves. “The Adhari spring starves the nearby and feeds the far beyond,” goes an old Bahraini saying describing the situation when a person becomes attached to a distant person, depriving neighbors of their company. This saying arises from the fact that the Adhari spring was below ground level, and the channels that distributed the water only reached ground level at Gufool, about a mile away, which has a slightly lower elevation than Adhari. Thus the pool was unable to irrigate the land nearby given the pull of gravity. Gufu–l (colloquial Bahraini, standard Qufu–l) means “locks” in Arabic, referring to the pools and irrigation systems for the date gardens in the area. There were several springs near Gufool in addition to Adhari. The name of the area to the south of Gufool, Zinj—according to my interlocutor Ismaʿil, an amateur historian and a member of the Bahrain Historical Society—is derived from zij, which refers to the qanawa–t used for the distribution of water, which would have come through Zinj from Adhari (but not irrigating Zinj). Others dispute this interpretation. In any case, Zinj used to be on the coast before reclamation projects extended the land mass, and Ismaʿil also told me how the seagulls still gather along the former coastline in Zinj, demonstrating the memory of the sea.

u n s ta b le s h el f The springs spout from the Dammam Aquifer, part of the Eastern Arabian Aquifer, a massive freshwater aquifer originating in Saudi Arabia and Oman that flows eastward under the limestone-based seafloor when it hits the Gulf. The aquifer is part of what the geologist F. R. S. Henson termed the “unstable shelf,” a geological formation that extends throughout the Arab world from Lebanon and Syria, through the Gulf to the United Arab Emirates and Oman.28 The Arabian Sea is known for its shallow waters, slow currents, and limited tidal range. Today, the Gulf is one of the most saline seas in

50

chapter two

the world, and one of the most stagnant. It can take up to two hundred years for the water to flush out through the Strait of Hormuz into the Indian Ocean. Green follows blue in arid environments. Blue water, when mixed with the yellow and white sands of the Gulf, has the power to produce greenery. A number of my interlocutors argued that the demand for green had altered the supply of blue—that the reclamation of the sea and the mass of the reclaimed land put on the underground channels destroyed the springs. Another often-cited reason for the loss of blue water is that the Saudi government decided to use the water “for its own gain”—for irrigating desert agriculture and the plethora of large irrigated fields visible from the air when one flies over the western Saudi provinces. However, both these narratives ignore the fact that Bahrain uses more water than it has access to. Few would dispute that the underground “second sea” has been largely depleted, and Bahrain is overextracting its water reserves. Water is fundamental to the provision of green. And water, especially freshwater, is in short supply in the Gulf. No issue is more important for national security in the Gulf than the availability of water. Many political scientists would agree that the availability of water is of more strategic importance in the Gulf than that of oil.29 Bahrain is no exception; indeed, it is at the forefront of this dilemma. The problem will worsen as the population of Bahrain and the Gulf continues to grow, as is predicted. As far as I can tell, the average Bahraini villa resident uses 227 liters of water a day. Fifty-two percent of the water used in a private villa goes to drinking and household use (including bathing and cooking), while 48 percent is used for watering lawns and washing cars, plus leakage. For apartments, which have no gardens, 80 percent of water goes to household use and 20 percent to car washing and leakage, adding up to 182 liters of water per person per day. These figures suggest that 28 percent of water use in villas (where most Bahrainis live) goes to irrigating lawns and greenery. This would indicate that 63.5 liters per capita per day is used to irrigate private green spaces in Bahrain. Overall, the country uses 750 liters per person per day, including industrial and other uses, whereas water use in Kuwait is alleged to be 700 liters per capita per day. Either Bahrainis are more wasteful of water or they have more greenery to water than do Kuwaitis.

the blueness of green

51

In the late afternoon I observed that it is common for householders to have their exterior walls washed down, rinsing away the dust of the day in advance of evening visitors to the family majlis. Cars are often washed in the very early morning (beginning at around 4 a.m.) by expatriate workers. Car washing, by hand, is an industry that has thrived since the labor laws were relaxed to allow expatriates to work without the direct supervision of a sponsor, in effect to become entrepreneurs. Irrigation demand for green areas like parks and roadside strips is typically 18 liters per day per square meter (this varies depending on the soft versus hard landscape percentages in a green open space, for example the ratio of paved versus planted surfaces). Newly planted date palms, for instance, can require up to 200 liters of water each per day, although older, established palms can get by on very little water owing to the tap root. Greenery is a major consumer of the national water quota, and I doubt that anyone knows exactly how much water is used for this purpose. The figures below, from the Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs, suggest that almost half the country’s water goes to the irrigation of agriculture, which is, arguably, retained only for its nostalgic or cultural value. Even though Bahrain’s diminishing numbers of farmers—some would say reduced to just a few hundred—produce 11–12 percent of Bahrain’s vegetable requirements, this adds up to 0.05 percent of the national income. Clearly, agriculture is conducted more for aesthetic reasons than by necessity: the appearance of greenery is more important for the national economy than the food that is produced.

wate r s ou r c es No data-driven study has been carried out on green in Bahrain, to my knowledge. A master plan for Bahrain prepared for the government by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), the large architectural and planning consultancy, presented ten strategies for the future of Bahrain. Turning the country green was the ninth of the ten most imperative objectives. The tenth was to promote a sustainable future. And as presented in this report, there does not appear to be any conflict between these two

52

chapter two

Table 2 Water Use in Bahrain (water uses in bahrain by sources and categories in mcm)

Source

Groundwater Desalinated Water TSE

Municipal

83.6 94.3 0 177.9

Agriculture

143.7 0 15.5 159.2

Industrial

12.2 8.1 0 20.3

Total

239.5 102.4 15.5 357.4

source: Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs

paradoxical aims of promoting greenery and sustainability at the same time. Desalinated water costs $12–$15 per one thousand gallons to produce, which based on the above figures would mean that Bahrain’s desalination costs are in the region of US$3 billion per year. Bahrain appears to desalinate 123 million cubic meters (mcm) of water per year in five plants: Sitra (41.5 mcm), Ras Abu Jarjur (22.4 mcm), Al-Dur (5 mcm), Hidd (49.8 mcm), and Alba (5 mcm). Other figures I have seen suggest that in 2005 Bahrain desalinated 130 mcm of water, almost four and a half times as much as in 1990, when it was 56 mcm. The country also produces 150,000–160,000 cubic meters per day of wastewater, of which 70,000 cubic meters is being ozonated and inculcated with chlorine (tertiary treatment) and used for agriculture and landscaping. One senior engineer told me that the wastewater is especially problematic to treat in Bahrain because of the presence of so many nationalities. He told me that feces of different “races” carry different bacteria, requiring different treatments. He singled out Indian feces as being “especially difficult and expensive to treat.” Bahrain’s treated sewage effluent (TSE) system was designed to produce 200,000 cubic meters of water per year. The system itself cost millions of dinars, and the plan exists in two phases: in Phase 2, 70 percent of agricultural land is to be maintained by TSE. The TSE is not fully treated, so is far from clean enough to drink, and TSE cannot be provided in areas where it may come into contact with children or food. Its use is allowed for

Figure 1.  Sinvs Persicvs, Arab Mare, Alachdar, id est viride (“that is Green”). (The Hebrew script reads as the Arabic word Alachdar.) Created in 1681, printed for Johannis Davidis Zunneri after the death of Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), cartographer. Geographiae Sacra, 1681. AH 3716.5, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Figure 2 (lower right).  Detail from a version of the above map. Hubert, R. (c. 1651), cartographer. “A description of the earth into which the inhabitants of Babel dispersed after the destruction of the tower,” dated 1651. H. H. Sheikh Dr. Sultan Bin Mohammed Al-Qasimi, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Figure 3 (lower left).  Satellite image of the Arabian peninsula, March 2000. Bahrain is the small island in the center of the image, adjacent to the larger peninsula of Qatar. Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE.

Figure 4.  Portuguese map of Bahrain showing an abundance of date palms. Livro 15, Colecção de São Vicente, liv. 15, PT/TT/CSV/15. Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Lisbon, Portugal.

Figure 5.  Map of Bahrain, 1963. Note areas of greenery on the north and west coasts. Drawn from aerial photographs 1952–1953. Reviewed and reprinted by Fairey Surveys Administration, and reprinted in Historic Maps of Bahrain, Academy Editions, London. Published by the Public Works Department of Bahrain, Government of the Kingdom of Bahrain. Figure 6 (Following page).  Satellite image of the north part of Bahrain, showing Manama on the top right and Budaiya on the top left. Pockets of greenbelt can be seen on the middle of top right. New reclamation projects line the north coast. Google Earth Image © 2016 DigitalGlobe.

Figure 7.  Manama as seen from Amwaj Island. Note the high-rise buildings designed to look like sails. Photograph by the author.

Figure 8.  Textures and hues of the Bahrain Financial Harbour. Photograph by the author.

Figure 9.  Government Avenue in the center of Manama as seen through the green tinted glass of the National Bank of Bahrain. Photograph by the author. Figure 10.  Bab al-Bahrain roundabout and fountain as seen through green tinted glass. Photograph by the author.

Figure 11.  Green carpet of house in Gufool, Manama. Photograph by the author.

Figure 12.  Pearl divers bringing waterskins filled with freshwater from underwater springs. Saudi Aramco, Steineke Collection.

Figure 13.  Water channel, 1963, from Glob and the Garden of Eden. Torkil Funder, Moesgård Museum.

Figure 14.  ʿAshuraʾ procession through Manama. Photograph by the author.

Figure 15.  Red paving bricks, City Center Mall, Bahrain. Photograph by Camille Zakharia.

Figure 16.  Pollinating a date palm, 1963, from Glob and the Garden of Eden. Torkil Funder, Moesgård Museum.

Figure 17.  Sheihk Ibrahim’s garden near the Portuguese Fort, 1963. Torkil Funder, Moesgård Museum.

Figure 18.  Date palm groves being replaced with villas with green painted roofs, 2006. Photograph by M. Hussaini.

Figure 19.  Villas in the greenbelt, 2008. Photograph by the author.

Figure 20.  “It’s like Scotland, minus the weather.” Advertisement for Riffa Views by J. Walter Thompson (JWT), Bahrain, 2006.

Figure 21.  The Royal Golf Club at Riffa Views, Bahrain. Photograph by the author.

Figure 22.  Jangily, a fine film of green on the desert after the winter rains. Photograph by the author.

Figure 23.  Kaff Maryam. Library of the Grey Herbarium, Harvard University.

Figure 24.  Dust storm over Bahrain, the Persian Gulf, and Saudi Arabia, March 17, 2008. (Bahrain in bottom right.) NASA image, courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response team.

Figure 25.  Inside the dust storm, Karbabad, Bahrain. March 16, 2008. Photograph by the author.

Figure 26.  Preparation of land for new development, Nabeh Saleh, Bahrain, 2010. Photograph by the author.

the blueness of green

53

plants whose fruit does not touch water directly, like date palms whose dates hang high in the air, but tomatoes and leafy vegetables cannot be watered with TSE. Meanwhile, groundwater is scarce and becoming scarcer. A change in ministry policy started to supply TSE to agricultural lands, to discourage farmers from using groundwater when the option of using TSE exists. But as one might expect, TSE is unpopular with end users. Some people object to TSE for public health reasons; others consider it h. ara–m, forbidden under Islamic law for being unclean. Yet other people refuse TSE because they want to develop their land and fear that the provision of TSE will condemn them forever to treat their land as agricultural land. Critically, land that is zoned as agricultural land has less development value than land that is no longer considered feasible for agriculture. The government has been working to develop a land use law to encourage increasing use of TSE, but the law has yet to be finalized at the time of writing. The recreational landscape is generally restricted from TSE watering, but these laws appear to be in a state of slow relaxation: a school was recently allowed to use TSE with “external conditions” (i.e., for use outdoors). One consultant to the government, an expatriate married to a Bahraini, told me that he had worked on the installation of the TSE system and that there are two systems as a subpart of a larger network: the ring around Manama and a system in the central area, including Hamad Town. A sewage treatment plant at Tubli Bay cost 100 million dinars to build (US$263 million), yet does not function as well as expected. Bernardo, the photographer, told me that he served on a committee advising on the potential role for treated sewage effluent in Bahrain. At one point TSE was discussed as a source of water for roadsides and roundabouts rather than desalinated or groundwater, but the committee rejected this idea on grounds of public hygiene. An alternative suggestion was put to the committee to use cactus or other desert plants along the roadways, the implication being that the desert plants would not require as much water or maintenance as the manicured green grass and date palms that are the norm. Powerful members of the committee asserted that there was no consensus to use desert plants in public spaces in Bahrain: there was “no mandate to promote that image.” Instead Bahrain

54

chapter two

continues to promote certain shades of green, and to use “real” water to sustain it, rather than turning to desert plants and the imagery of poverty they might invoke. There is a belief that enough water to maintain greenery should be freely available; indeed, the right to water is fundamental to the Bahraini tradition and mindset. My friend Shahab once recited to me a Bahraini nursery rhyme, “al-ma–y min ʿind Allah” (Water is from God). Water is often considered a human right in Islam, and there are diverse views as to whether this means the water should be free of charge or if charging for water can be one way of protecting the right.30 Since desalinated water is obviously not terribly salty—unlike the groundwater, which has become increasingly saline in recent years—the preference for groundwater has implications for the taste of home-grown fruits and vegetables. Isa told me that the salinity of the groundwater affects the pungency of the tomatoes in his mother’s garden, implying that they taste even better when irrigated with salty water. Nevertheless, increasing salinity is often given as the reason for the demise of the date palm groves. The source of Isa’s family’s running water often switched during the day, depending on periods of peak demand, and Isa maintains that it is possible to tell the source of the water—whether groundwater or desalinated—when taking a shower. With the prevalence of desalinated water, gardeners can now grow a greater array of plants in Bahrain, including those that are saltintolerant, a welcome development for members of the Bahrain Gardening Club. Agriculture is not as profitable as it was in the past. An official in the Ministry for Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs told me that the Government of Bahrain plans to maintain and preserve agricultural areas and increase the quality and quantity of production, and to achieve this by using groundwater together with TSE for irrigation. “We need to fix this,” said a professor at the Arabian Gulf University (AGU). To this end, hydroponic systems are currently being developed at the AGU for use in Bahrain. However, agriculture in Bahrain is now largely an aesthetic practice, and hydroponic systems, while functional and practical, need to be more focused on the practice of green. In other words, since agriculture is generally practiced as a link with the past rather than for its productive value, hydroponics may be more successful if integrated with traditional agricultural and spatial practices.

the blueness of green

55

blu e in t h e c i t y “Insects do not like blue,” insisted Isa, pointing to the blue chairs outside the Ahmed Abdul Rahim coffee shop in the Manama suq. Isa had brought me there on a spring evening for Arabic coffee. In coffee shops, chairs are painted blue to keep the insects away, he told me. We were on Government Avenue, in the heart of Manama, and men were sitting outside the coffee shop in the heat of a spring evening playing backgammon and smoking tobacco leaves in gidu, a local form of shı–sha (water pipe or hookah). I found the smell of this traditional tobacco, which is smoked from a pipe, so intense and repugnant that I wondered why they needed the help of blue chairs to keep the insects away. I once bought a bottle of water from the same café, and the smell of the tobacco had somehow permeated the plastic bottle to flavor the water. There is no scientific reason why that color in particular would repel insects; however, the repellant effect may have more to do with the chemicals used to make the blue paint than with the color itself. Nevertheless, people swear by the ability of blue chairs to repel insects, which are often seen in private gardens too. Umm Isa, perhaps encouraged by her son, has many blue chairs in her garden next to the blue pool. A little farther up Government Avenue we came to Bab Al Bahrain (“the Gateway to Bahrain”) in the center of Manama, an edifice designed and built by Charles Belgrave in the late 1940s. This building, which now serves as a tourism hub, was formerly on the shoreline. Now it is cut off from the shoreline by ever extending reclamation projects that house the Bahrain Financial Harbour. The King Faisal Highway, named after the Saudi king who ruled from 1964 to 1975, and the main thoroughfare from Saudi Arabia to the Bahrain airport, runs between the Bahrain Financial Harbour and the city. In front of Bab Al Bahrain, between it and the highway, is to be found one of the few public fountains in Bahrain. In the past the space was a public plaza, but in the interest of discouraging lowincome bachelors from the Indian subcontinent from gathering there, the plaza was converted into a bubbling fountain. Nowadays, the fountain functions as a roundabout, a popular location for taxis that ferry tourists to and from the suq and various hotels. The area is still a magnet for the expatriate workers who live in the suq nearby. Not even the sea can be

56

chapter two

seen from Bab Al Bahrain any more, even though it is a former port, and the fountain is one of the few glimpses of water in the otherwise dry and arid landscape of Manama.

“give the coast back to the pe ople” Between 95 and 97 percent of Bahrain’s coastline is owned privately or by the government and is thus inaccessible to the majority of citizens and residents.31 New artificial islands and reclamation projects in Bahrain have developed new beaches, which will not provide public access to the coast since they are effectively within gated communities: strictly controlled points of entry and out of bounds to the majority of locals. The North Town is an exception—a new and as yet unfinished artificial island development designed for public housing, partly opened in 2014, which will have public beaches whose perimeters will be considered to increase the percentage of coastline accessible to the public. To this end, North Bahrain is akin to the Palms in Dubai, where, environmental concerns aside, a stated objective in development was to maximize the length of sea frontage. When its sinuous coastline is completed, 12.45 kilometers, or 19 percent of Bahrain’s coastline, will be regarded as publicly accessible.32 The right to the sea, if one assumes that the sea is a public landscape asset, is greatly restricted in Bahrain. Yet newspaper reports indicate that this “right” is starting to be asserted or reclaimed more strongly. The Environment Friends Society, a group of Bahraini activists, has been campaigning for more public beaches. Their campaign was launched under the slogan “Our Beaches Are Ours” at a festival at al-Jazair beach, which according to a letter to the Gulf Daily News, the local English language daily, is “apparently [at the time] the only public beach left in Bahrain.”33 Another letter to the Gulf Daily News, in response to the Environment Friends Society campaign, asserts, “It is heaven for young and old, when you sit and watch the endless sea, which gives you a feeling of vastness and peace. Let our children know what lies on the other side of the wall.”34 The wall between people and the sea that the letter writer refers to is a buffer zone that contains some of the most protected—and private—land on the Bahraini archipelago. This land is untouched by the property speculation

the blueness of green

57

that has consumed the rest of the kingdom. Driving along the western coast, one is almost entirely separated from the sea by a strip of greenery one to two kilometers wide: the private estates of the elites. Some of these properties are so verdant that, in the words of one of the landscape designers who worked there, they “resemble Indonesia.” These protected lands, isolated from speculation and from the Bahraini public, are among the highest consumers of water in a land where resources are being overused and overextracted. The highly protected greenery, chopped up into different land parcels, is what makes the beaches so inaccessible. The elites have green, while the public have sand. *

*

*

JWT, the largest advertising agency in the United States, which had an office in Bahrain, came up with the slogan “Blue is the new green.” They suggest that companies will need to move beyond paying lip service to issues of environmentalism and prove their deeper commitment. A “trendletter” prepared by JWT to predict market changes argues, “To avoid charges of greenwashing, companies will have to go blue. In other words, they will need to improve the eco-factor of not only the products they sell but also every other aspect of their operation. Producing and selling an environmentally sound product is all well and good, but ‘blue’ means that everything else—from human resources to manufacturing—incorporates environmental principles as well.”35 Significantly, they point out that while green is appropriated widely, it is often associated with a self-righteous position. On the other hand, blue is a color with few preconceptions; they say it is a color for everyone. According to JWT, blue presents a more real and far-reaching concept of environmental consciousness than does green. Dutch Boy, the U.S.-based paint company, asserts that “blue is America’s favorite color!”36 A survey by Pantone, the color expert company, maintained that “blue is the most popular color to consumers. Everything from business suits to bedroom walls are [sic] turning up blue . . . . ‘There is a psychological investment to blue,’ says Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute. ‘The words most usually associated with blue are often ‘dependable,’ ‘loyal’ and ‘steadfast.’”37 These are marketing quotes, designed to “sell” things,

58

chapter two

and should be understood in that context. Landscape, however, is also a commodity, and its color an essential feature. Learning the cultural values of the color of landscape, and how they function in a cosmopolitan society, is an important part of shaping its future. Rania, a Levantine Dubai-based environmentalist and the elder sister of a close friend who introduced us, told me that a group she headed on marine conservation has been promoting blue as the color of environmentalism in Dubai—rather than green—because of its connection to water. “I have long felt that ‘green’ is too strange of a term for us,” Rania told me in an e-mail. “I have long maintained that the ‘green’ movement should be ‘blue’ in this part of the world, where blue gold is the most important asset, or even ‘yellow’ to give deserts their due.”38 Rania has a point: beach or oasis, the imagery of abundant water functions as a powerful contrast to the austerity of desert throughout the Arab world.

con s id e rat i o n s Green has many identities. Green deceives, as the anthropologist Michael Taussig says in What Color Is the Sacred?39 Taussig echoes the color artist Josef Albers, who also tells us that color can trick us: “In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”40 By this they are reminding us that color theory has puzzled artists and philosophers, and questions over the nuances of meaning have occupied some of the finest minds without consensus. When considered together with the objects that are colored, color is no less misleading. Then add the ambiguity associated with juxtaposition with other colors and hues, and color becomes even more potentially deceptive. One way to make green is to add blue water to yellow sand. Figures suggest that over half of Bahrain’s water resources go toward maintaining green spaces, including agriculture, in arid desert areas. In arid environments like the Gulf, with finite water reserves, greenery has historically required a complex physical, customary, and legal infrastructure. When one factors in the costs of water (environmental as well as financial), greenery is unsurprisingly expensive to maintain. In 2002, for instance, Dubai is alleged to have spent over US$1 billion on desalinating water just

the blueness of green

59

for irrigating public green areas. Why do this unless the green areas have definite economic, political, and social values? What might these values be, and how might they be quantified? There is a strong belief in Bahrain that there were many more hues of blue in the water in the past—“every shade of blue and green and purple,” as Belgrave tells us. If there is a need to focus on reducing the demand for blue, we should keep in mind that blue and green are inseparable. Water can be more efficiently managed only if green is too.

3

How Green Can Become Red They’re turning the country red. —Sayyed Hashem

I was talking to a Jordanian-born civil servant called Muhammad, an official in one of the ministries, about the bedding plants propagated every year in Bahrain to be planted along the highways. Muhammad had a gardening manual open in front of him and would answer my technical questions—about watering, lighting, growing season—by glancing at the manual. He reminded me of a student who had not done his homework or was unfamiliar with his assignment. Muhammad’s ministry is responsible for those highway beds, along with other issues of urban development. He told me that his department grows about 4.5 million petunias every year to replace plants that have died. These long-flowering annuals of South American origin can withstand hot climates and poor soil, yet still keep smiling at passing drivers for much of the year. In red and white, the national colors, they decorate the roadways, particularly along the VIP roads—designed primarily for the elites—and are at their most splendid for Bahrain National Day on December 16. The plethora of highway median strips and green roundabouts lined with red and white petunias illustrate contemporary understandings of development, national pride, and politics in Bahrain. As can be seen from the many billboards with pictures of the king, his son the crown prince, 60

how green can become red

61

and the prime minister (the king’s uncle) that accompany the petunias, the rulers are happy to be associated with red, white, and green. One rarely sees these royal billboards in desert areas, for instance, or along ungreened roadways. More often than not placed on green grass roadsides, the billboards demonstrate the rulers’ pride at turning the country green. The name of the design and advertising company responsible for them, Miracle, adds something of the supernatural to the subtle messages one might infer from these billboards, which often include the red of the Bahraini flag. Red is the complementary color to green on a standard color wheel, and indeed red—a particular shade of red—is rarely far from sight in Bahrain. The ever-present Bahraini national flag, redesigned in 2002 to mark the proclamation of Bahrain as a kingdom rather than an emirate, is roughly two-thirds red and one-third white. The red dates back to the early 1800s, when the flag was nothing but red, similar to the plain green Libyan flag. The white band was added after the 1820 Great Maritime Truce, as a symbol of friendship with the British, and originally with a much more serrated edge. The truce led to the affiliation of what became known as the Trucial States with Bahrain. (Also known as the Pirate Coast, the principal emirates of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al-Quwain, Fujairah, and Ras al-Khaimah formed the Trucial States and then the present-day United Arab Emirates.) The earliest visual evidence of the Bahraini flag, according to my friend and interlocutor Alireza, was in a painting by an English naval officer in 1918. Bahrain’s official flag between 1932 and 1972 had thirty-two serrations between the red and the white; after independence from Britain in 1972, the number of serrations was reduced to eight, similar to the current Qatari flag. The present iteration of the Bahraini flag, since 2002, has five serrations between red and white. These five serrations represent the five pillars of Islam. The specific shade of red is Pantone 186C, to use a contemporary measure of color. This national red of Bahrain can be seen everywhere. It’s the color of government shields as well as the Royal Court, and since the introduction of the Bahraini flag onto vehicular license plates, it has become even more pervasive. The Bahraini flag, along with that of Qatar, is distinct among national flags in the Islamic world, which usually use a combination of red, black, and green. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan both have green flags, for instance. The green in the flag of India is reputed to represent Muslims, the orange

62

chapter three

Hindus, and the white peace. Why is there red and no green in Bahrain’s flag, one might wonder? *

*

*

“They’re turning the country red,” Sayyed Hashem remarked, relaying his mother’s complaint. Umm Hashem was referring to the red concrete paving bricks being deployed all over Bahrain. These bricks, according to Umm Hashem, were spoiling the look of the country: the bricks were ugly because of their color. The red pavers, concrete colored with an added pigment, are diluted and dusty shades of red, much more subdued than the bold red of the flag, with the sand and sun softening the bricks’ color even further over time. I noticed many new pavements installed to replace plain gray concrete, black asphalt, and dust. The bricks were usually delivered on wooden pallets held together with green bands. I had met Sayyed Hashem and his friend Juma at a lecture I gave at the National Museum, at the invitation of the then minister for culture, Sheikha Mai. Sayyed Hashem and Juma had subsequently invited me to travel to Buri village as well as to the desert nearby with them. They told me the bricks were manufactured by Kingdom Bricks, a Bahrain-based concrete firm.

h ow re d is g r ee n The symbolic meaning of green and red are often interchangeable in Bahrain, often switching places or seeming to substitute one for another. It is as if these colors take on one another’s symbolic meaning. You might say that red does not always appear as red; in fact, it sometimes appears as green, and indeed green appears as red.1 One is reminded of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red. Red speaks as the pigment waiting to be applied to a painting: “I am so fortunate to be red! I’m firey. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted.”2 On asking red to describe itself to someone who cannot see, a blind miniaturist replied, “If we touched it with the tip of a finger, it would feel like something between iron and copper. If we took it into our palm, it would burn. If we tasted it, it would be full-bodied, like salted meat. If we took it between our lips it

how green can become red

63

would fill our mouths. If we smelled it, it’d have the scent of a horse. If it were a flower, it would smell like a daisy, not a red rose.”3 In Bahrain certain hues of green sometimes feel like red. The aim of this chapter is to show that in some cases even though Bahrainis see—and feel—red, it is really green, and sometimes when they think it is green, it is really red. Thus, it becomes necessary to discuss both red and green.

g r een a n d i s l a m ( a n d t h e s h i ʿ a ) “Come back next week, Mr. Gary, and you’ll see a lot of green for the Prophet’s birthday,” said Latif. I would frequently attend the meeting halls, maʾa–tim, with Latif, a pious Shiʿi in his fifties and one of my closest interlocutors in Bahrain. We were in the Maʾtam Abdul Rasul Abdul Aal in the center of Manama, and the gathering was in commemoration of the death of Imam Hasan, the second Shiʿi imam and a very important religious figure for the Shiʿa.4 The interior of the maʾtam was decorated with black banners and drapes, but with some vivid greens as well as the pale green carpet. It was winter, and many of the men in the maʾtam who sat around the perimeter talking and drinking Arabic coffee and tea wore heavy woolen black thiya–b. Had I been able to come back a few days later for the Prophet’s birthday, the maʾtam, as Latif suggested, would be festooned with green in every direction. Writing about the significance of green for the Shiʿa, the Bahraini anthropologist Sawsan Karimi describes how the minbar, or pulpit, in the maʾtam, is always covered in green cloth, apart from the two months when Imam Husayn’s martyrdom is mourned, at which time it is shrouded in black.5 Shiʿi religious centers and Shiʿi villages are often adorned with green, especially at the commemorations of the birth of the Prophet and the Ahl al-Bayt, the Prophet’s household. Green is a color very clearly associated with the Shiʿa population. When I mentioned my research to non-Muslim expatriates in Bahrain, they invariably asked me if I knew that green is the color of Islam. Rarely would they go beyond this observation, and never to distinguish between Shiʿism and Sunnism. If they went farther, it was to mention the prevalence of green in the national flags of Arab states, especially the Saudi Arabian flag, and the pure green of the Libyan flag. Sometimes they would then ask

64

chapter three

me if I knew about Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s Green Book, although not usually knowing much about it other than its name.6 Expatriates routinely share an association between green and Islam, but this connection is less powerful, or at any rate less overt, among Bahrainis. It should be said that Bahrainis are generally careful not to mention religious or political associations out of context, and especially not to a foreign researcher. That said, I found that Bahrainis invariably associate green with the imperiled date palm groves, a connection much clearer among Shiʿa than among Sunnis—or at least more Shiʿa admit to its importance. Sunnis in Bahrain are somewhat influenced by Wahhabism across the causeway in Saudi Arabia, and so tend not to use so much symbolism, considering it a form of shirk, or idolatry. From my own experience, Sunnis were reluctant to talk about green in any great depth. Sawsan Karimi remarks, “Sunnis regard green as the colour of Islam as seen in the flags of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Shiʿa perceive green as a color exclusive to the ahl al-bayt,” and the nadhr ribbons used for prayers at Shiʿi shrines are most often green, made from green cloth from saints’ graves.7 Only Shiʿi mosques have green-colored domes in Bahrain, “symbolising the colour of the divine.”8 Alireza told me that the Shrine of Abdul Aziz, a popular Shiʿi place of pilgrimage near Al-Khamis Mosque, the oldest mosque in Bahrain, is known among his friends as “the Second Irish Embassy” because of its green dome and the abundance of green flags and buntings surrounding it. Moreover, these domes are often covered with turquoise tiles: the Imam Sadiq Mosque in Gufool imported its tiles from Turkey, and those of the Maʾtam al-‘Ajam al-Kabir in the Manama suq originated in Isfahan. Like Bahrain, Iran has a Shiʿi majority. The hues of green associated with the Shiʿa in Bahrain are often associated with backwardness and trouble; they acquire a particular social meaning. When I met with a prominent Bahraini Shiʿi cleric, who like most Shiʿi clerics was educated in Iran, he told me he could not talk much about green. We met in his impressive library, and he apologized that he had never really thought about the significance of the color in Islam in any great depth. What the religious sheikh said on theological grounds is one thing, but the popular practice and meaning of green is something else. The sheikh wore a white turban, or ʿima–ma. Latif, who set up the meeting and brought me to meet the sheikh, later told me that this white ʿima–ma

how green can become red

65

represents descent from Hasan, the Prophet’s grandson. When I repeated this to Alireza, he insisted that the white signifies no genealogical tie, with Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ, religious authorities, in Bahrain as well as in Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and the other Gulf states, commonly wearing white turbans.9 Had the sheikh worn a black ʿima–ma, however, it would indicate direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. There are many explanations given for the symbolism of the black ʿima–ma. Some say it is because the Prophet’s flag was black; others say the Prophet dressed Imam Ali in a black ʿima–ma, and it has remained a tradition ever since.10 A green turban, which is rarely seen, would indicate either a degree of learning or descent from Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson.11 (A few of my interlocutors told me that green is sometimes considered the color of Husayn.)12 “Only the black and green [turbans] have significance,” Alireza explained. “When you see green and black you call the person Sayyid, because you know that the person is of an important lineage.”

g r een a n d r e v o lut i o n The peculiarities of green in Bahrain are inextricably linked to Iran. Sharing a Shiʿi majority, Iran sometimes regards Bahrain as a lost province of Iran and expresses a hope for reunification.13 Green has wide significance in Iran; for instance, the Green Movement in Iran is not an environmental cause but arose out of the disputed 2009 election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mass protests that followed. The appropriation of green for the antistate resistance in Iran was obvious in news reports and photos taken that summer. After protestors adopted green as their symbolic color, Iranian authorities began removing public displays of green. One blogger described the green-avoidance of the Iranian regime, when he/she asked: quiz: What dangerous element in Tehran’s Vanek Square was covered up in

time for Nowruz? answer: Green sidewalk marking.14

Another blogger described a street scene where municipal workers in Tehran were filmed painting over green sidewalk markings with black.

66

chapter three

Iranian officials had suddenly come down with a strange case of “chlorophobia,” or fear of green. Even the green band at the top of the Iranian national flag was not unaffected. Online reports at the time showed Ahmadinejad in press conferences standing in front of an Iranian flag where the green strip had been recolored blue or splashed over with black. The attempted Green Revolution in Iran in 2009 showed distinct parallels between green, Shiʿi Islam, and revolution. Bahrain’s government too has something to fear from certain shades of green. I was constantly reminded by my Shiʿi interlocutors that the Sunnis don’t like green, whereas the Shiʿa do. A prominent poet, Mahdi, told me that Sunnis are descended from nomads who are, in his words, “desert people, who do not value green,” and as strange as this comment may seem, it is what Mahdi and many other people told me. Perhaps this is the origin of the saying “The dogs of Isfahan drink iced water and the Arabs of the desert eat lizards,” which implies that Sunnis are barbarians. Mahdi explained how the al-Khalifa clan came from Kuwait to Bahrain via Qatar and displayed sympathy for the desert but not the oases of green date palms. For this reason, he told me, there was no empathy for green from the powers that be in Bahrain. This eco-ethno-mythology is little more than trash talk, of course. Multiple sheikhs are notorious for living in properties surrounded by lush green vegetation, including the king’s deceased uncle, Sheikh Mohammed. But a clear pattern does emerge: when green is mentioned to Bahrainis of any persuasion, they bring up the date palm groves. The graygreen of the date palms is the iconic hue of green from which identity is derived. The proximity of the date palm groves to the Shiʿi settlements and strongholds of resistance to the Bahraini state is not insignificant. These are the indigenous green areas in Bahrain. Their history, and indeed future, is a complex one, and intertwined with green.

back to r ed I was invited one evening to the Maʾtam bin Rajab for a celebration in honor of one of the senior members of the Bin Rajab family. Mr. Bin Rajab had called for a feast to be held at the maʾtam. I arrived to find a steady flow of warm, thick, fresh, pungent blood running right over the red concrete brick

how green can become red

67

paving blocks. The orange sodium street lighting made the red blood appear almost black but did not lessen the smell. The animals had just been ceremonially slaughtered on the street and the carcasses lined up on the pavement outside the maʾtam. When I inquired of Latif if that was the meat we would eat for dinner in the maʾtam (and quietly thinking that I would become a vegetarian for the evening), I was informed, “No! We give this meat to the poor. We will eat real meat!” As we ate the feast that evening, using our hands to eat the fresh lamb, rice, tomatoes, onions, and yogurt while sitting on the floor, my mind kept turning to the slaughtered animals hanging outside. Still, the rivulets of red animal blood that I witnessed that evening were relatively insignificant in comparison to another sight I was soon to behold.

back to g r ee n a g a i n During the first ten days of the month of Muharram, in the Islamic hijrı– (lunar) calendar, the suffering and martyrdom of Imam Husayn is commemorated in the center of Manama. The Manama suq is clothed in green and black banners—often with red writing—and the streets strewn with green sweet basil, locally known as mashmu–m. Mashmu–m is the only greenery traditionally used on Shiʿi graves, typically spread on graves on Thursday evenings. It is often available at the gates of the graveyards, either for sale or donated by a benefactor; I often saw mashmu–m sellers outside the cemetery at Naim, near where I lived in Gufool. Mashmu–m commonly grows around Shiʿi mosques and maʾa–tim, and is very easy to raise: “Just put a stick in the ground and it will grow,” said an attendant at the mosque at Jid al-Haj village on the north coast. Mashmu–m is not just associated with the Shiʿa; it is traditionally placed on Bahraini wedding beds, where most decorations at the wedding including the wedding dress itself are traditionally green.15 As Alireza said when speaking of green at weddings, “Even the sugar is green.”

bl o od s ta i n s : t h e e t h n og ra p h i c e xp e r i e n c e As a visual experience, ʿAshuraʾ is restricted to three dominant colors: green, black, and red, the same colors that are on most Arab flags.16 The

68

chapter three

greens contrast with the beige and sandy-colored buildings of the city, like greenery against the desert. The reds contrast with the green and with the white of clothing. My fieldnotes from a tour of the effigies of Husayn, a trip on which Latif took me, indicated lots of green in everything: from the signs to the paintings and banners. All of the effigies had a distinctly green theme. One of the striking features of the Muharram commemorations is the amount of greenery on the streets and on the banners and flags inside and outside the mosques and maʾa–tim. Not just green flags, signs, and bunting, but herbs, including mashmu–m. Mashmu–m has a particularly pungent smell, which an expatriate told me is used to negate the smell during the ʿAshuraʾ bloodletting on the tenth day of Muharram (not successfully, in my experience). It is a day when several thousand men, mostly in their teens and twenties, partake in letting their own blood to share in the suffering of Husayn. The mashmu–m green mixes with red blood to create a cacophony of colors in the city. As a purely visual event, it is spectacular. Much of the power of ʿAshuraʾ comes from the particular mix of colors and smells. Also there is the contrast of green, red, and black (the black being mostly in the form of banners and women’s clothing) with the white clothing. Participants in Haydar, as the procession is known, wear white shrouds and pour water over their heads, which dilutes and extends the appearance of blood on clothing. The white clothing symbolizes the kafan, “the fabric in which we wrap the dead,” as Alireza described it. The wearing of the kafan signifies that “we are ready to die for Husayn,” said Latif. This burial shroud worn by Shiʿa participants in the Haydar processions is also considered to hold some essence of baraka, or blessings, since it is done out of love for the Prophet’s household, the Ahl al-Bayt.17 During the month of Muharram, I felt a shift in my relationship with Bahrain and Bahrain’s relationship with me. ʿAshuraʾ is as important to Shiʿa Muslims as, for example, Good Friday is to Catholics. Indeed, there are many parallels between the two festivals, with ʿAshuraʾ commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, and members of the Prophet’s family near Karbala in modern-day Iraq in the year 61 a.h. (680 a.d.).18 This event is represented with intense graphic explicitness. The martyrdom of Imam Husayn was to change the course of Islam and confirm the schism between Sunnis and Shiʿa. ʿAshuraʾ’s sig-

how green can become red

69

nificance is amplified in Bahrain because—as a festival particular to Shiʿa—ʿAshuraʾ is not celebrated by Sunnis. About three months after my arrival in Bahrain and two days before ʿAshura,ʾ I was walking from my home in Gufool through the Manama suq toward the Ras Rumman neighborhood in the east of the city, where I hoped to have my laptop repaired. I stopped to take photographs of greenery, likely mashmu–m, being incorporated into street decorations for the nighttime processions that take place through Manama during Muharram. A middle-aged man approached me, pointed to my camera, and said, “al-sala–m ʿalaykum, do you want to take some photographs?” Remembering that James Hamad Belgrave (Charles’s son) had stated that it was forbidden to photograph during Muharram, I was thinking that I was going to be reprimanded and instinctively hid my camera behind my back.19 Instead, the gentleman continued, saying, “Come with me and I’ll show you good sights to photograph. I am Latif, what is your name?” I was to spend the following three days and much of the nights with Latif and his extended family based at their house in the Manama suq. His immense kindness and thoughtful assistance toward a stranger met by chance in the street impressed me very much. Latif brought me through the winding streets to an exhibition of photographs of Shiʿi shrines in Iraq and Iran. We walked there past the Maʾtam al-ʿAjam al-Kabir, built by the great grandfather of my friend Isa, with its dome delicately covered with Persian tiles brought from Isfahan; I was to spend some time in that maʾtam over the coming days. The exhibition was located down a dark alleyway and housed in a tent erected for the ʿAshuraʾ festivities. There we saw photographs taken by Mahmoud, Latif ’s brother, of holy Shiʿi sites in Iran and Iraq. Mahmoud was clearly a gifted photographer and had captured images of pilgrims in Mashhad and Karbala. As we walked back to Al Emam Al Hussein Avenue, I was struck by the quantity of images of Ayatollah Khomeini and other Iranian clerics in the windows of the religious artifact shops we passed. The play between religion and politics in Bahrain is at its most acute during ʿAshuraʾ.20 Although it is a Shiʿi festival, Sunnis have been known in some cases to take part in the Muharram rituals. Ilias, a Sunni born in Bahrain to Pakistani parents, told me that he took part in ʿAshuraʾ to empathize with his Shiʿi friends. Ilias had dropped me at the American Mission Hospital

70

chapter three

the night before but asked me not to show the scarf I had been given by a Shiʿi friend, as it might draw the attention of the police. The black scarf had Husayn written on it in decorative white Arabic script. People come to Manama suq from all over Bahrain, Muharraq, Budaiya, and small villages such as Aali and Buri. People come from all over the Gulf to participate in the rituals, the public display of which is mostly not allowed in their home countries. As one Shiʿi told me, Bahrain is one of only three Shiʿi-majority nations, and the most stable, the other two being Iran and Iraq. Saudi Arabia has a sizable Shiʿi minority on the east coast, across from Bahrain, as does Lebanon. “ʿAshuraʾ is a show of power, not grief. This is a political rather than religious festival,” declared Ismaʿil during those days, in the context of explaining how we are in the beginning of a new period of Shiʿi strength.21 Before we parted that afternoon, Latif invited me to join him and his family that evening for the processions through the streets of Manama. I had heard about these processions but was not sure what to expect or where best to witness them. I had asked my Sunni friends, but they did not know. Latif explained that groups from the various maʾa–tim would assemble to march through the streets; that the processions—also known by the Persian name ʿazada–rı–—would start after evening prayer and continue to the early hours of the following morning. He would go home to Saar for his customary afternoon nap before returning to the city. Latif told me that he was born in and grew up in Manama but following the norms at the time his family had moved to the west of the island in the 1970s. The family home in the heart of the suq was now empty, but they used it as a base during Muharram. We arranged to meet outside the “Persian maʾtam,” Maʾtam al-ʿAjam al-Kabir, a landmark in the center of the suq, at 7 p.m., and exchanged mobile phone numbers in case there was any confusion. When we met that evening, Latif was accompanied by his cousin Abbas. ʿAshuraʾ is the culmination of an intense period of processions, religious preaching, and socializing. In the days preceding ʿAshuraʾ men meet in maʾa–tim (maʾa–tim are strictly single-sex meeting houses, sometimes called “funeral houses”) to talk and listen to preaching and recitations of the story of Husayn’s martyrdom. The stories of sacrifice and lost hope are crafted to perfection, so much so that I cried when an artist at the

how green can become red

71

Bahrain Arts Society first recounted to me the narrative of Husayn’s martyrdom. I had been forewarned by Latif and Abbas that I might have this reaction but had shrugged them off, underestimating the power to stir the emotions of the sheer poetry of words. As the artist told me about the fate of Husayn, in words so carefully chosen and no doubt amplified by the haunting rhythms of music and chanting coming from the street outside, I found tears running down my face. I spent the evenings walking through the streets with Latif and his family, and visiting various maʾa–tim. There we would drink Arabic coffee or tea and chat. In one maʾtam, we had some rice and meat. Always, people would ask whether I was a Muslim yet and where I was from. When I mentioned Ireland, particularly the north of the country, the conversation would invariably turn toward the Irish Republican Army. Bahrain’s Shiʿi community look to the Irish political situation for inspiration. They identify with sectarian strife and with those oppressed by a perceived dominant political power, and were interested in knowing about the resolution of that conflict. The lower floor of Latif ’s family home was opened up and the male members of his extended family served h. alı–b zaʿfara–n, hot milk laced with saffron. One evening, as I walked to his house, I was approached by a television crew to say a few words on the power of the festival and how it seemed to me as a foreigner. Remembering Steven Caton’s experience in Yemen, where he too was invited to speak publicly but declined for fear of prejudicing his informants, I declined to give the interview.22 It was at Latif ’s family house that I had my first (and only) experience eating sheep’s brains. It was somewhere in the zone in the middle of a sleepless night when one loses track of time, and Latif ’s family was serving breakfast to the men gathered in the room. They placed a dish on a table in the center of the room and insisted that I eat from it. I think it was a genuine desire to share a Bahraini tradition with me, and I felt compelled to eat from the dish even though I was not hungry. As I took my first few bites, it suddenly dawned on me that this mix of bread and milky fluid had a strange meaty texture. It dawned on me what I was eating, but too late: it was impolite not to eat at least a decent portion before making my excuses. The dish is called pa–cha and is eaten only between about 3 a.m. and around dawn.

72

chapter three

For the last few nights of Muharram leading up to ʿAshuraʾ, Latif and his family would stay in Manama till at least 3 a.m. watching the various processions wind their way through the city, along routes agreed with the state. The family would come and go from the converted space on the ground floor. I was struck by how male dominated this festival was. Muharram is characterized by young men in the streets beating themselves to the rhythm of the music and chanting, “H . aydar! H . aydar! H . aydar!” Typically women line the streets as spectators, wearing black abayas, and watch the processions pass by. There are some ladies-only maʾa–tim beginning to open in Manama, to which I of course would not gain entry. On the ninth night of Muharram, we left Manama a little early, having made arrangements to meet again at 7 a.m.: Latif would collect me near my home in Gufool and drive us back to the center of Manama. It was the morning of the tenth day, ʿAshuraʾ. Having arrived, along with Latif, in the early morning when the bloodletting starts, a Londoner in his twenties whose name was Maagid approached me. He was concerned that I was perhaps not prepared for what I was about to see. I confidently retorted, “Yes, of course!” Maagid did not seem convinced. We chatted about north London, where I used to live, and in his Estuary accent, Maagid told me that he participated in the ritual in London—“indoors, of course.” This year he had decided to come to Bahrain, where his family was from. In Bahrain, he could openly participate in Haydar on the street without recrimination, he said. Wearing white thiya–b, with their heads uncovered by the usual ghutra (as the kaffiyeh is known in the Gulf ), the traditional headdress worn by men, several groups of young men were gathered on the streets. I could see a few large swords among the crowd. I didn’t at first notice the swords being placed lightly on the heads of the young men, and neither did I notice the first drops of blood. I was expecting to hear outcries or some indication of pain, but the process was largely silent. I realized what was going on only when a group of men including Latif ’s eldest son, Hamad, started beating their heads. Beating the head with the palm of the hand encourages the blood to flow and drip over their white robes. Later we saw water poured over the wounds to make the red run farther over the clothes.

how green can become red

73

Hamad had pleaded for years with his father to allow him to do Haydar. Latif had always said no, but in the end, he asked Hamad why he wanted to do it. Was it to show off among his friends or was it out of love for Husayn? Hamad replied that it was out of love for Husayn, and Latif relented. Hamad was in his early twenties at this time. The trickle of blood from his head was not very impressive, and he seemed disappointed, tapping his head regularly to try to draw more blood. Latif told me that the blood flow is dependent on the blood pressure, and Hamad’s blood pressure must have been unusually low. Participants claim the cut doesn’t hurt and heals before too long. It is a controversial practice, with many Shiʿa thinking and saying it does an injustice to Shiʿism by making the Shiʿa seem “like savages.” Fatwas have been issued against it in the past, and one can only imagine the capacity for disease transmission from all the bloody swords, which are not cleaned between cuts.23 A temporary clinic is set up in the suq to deal with people seriously injured as a result of the bloodletting. After a few minutes, once satisfied that heads were cut and preparations made, Latif and I walked to the center of the suq so we would have a better view of the procession to follow. There we saw the thousands of mostly young men wearing white thiya–b, their heads covered with blood. ʿAshuraʾ is the only day when the shops, even the Dairy Queen in Gufool, are closed. I was told by Ilias, who like me often ate there, that the owner of the local franchise is Shiʿi. The smell of blood is distinctive. Veterans of combat consider it an abiding memory.24 Even a mile from the main route of the processions in Gufool, which is on the edges of Manama, the air was thick with the sickening scent for hours afterward. At one point, Latif asked his brother Mahmoud, the professional photographer, to take my photograph. Mahmoud, who was covering the procession for a local daily newspaper, Al Ayam (meaning “The Days”), thought Latif had asked to take me with him while he was photographing, and he beckoned to me to follow. Before I knew it, I was in the midst of a procession of two thousand to three thousand men carrying swords, heads bleeding over their white thiya–b, beating their chests in unison to haunting, lamenting music, and chanting, “H . aydar! H . aydar! H . aydar!” I got quickly carried along with the crowd as Mahmoud and I both took photographs in the midst of the procession.

74

chapter three

I spent an hour or so winding through the shaded narrow streets of Manama, taking photos and being drawn into the euphoria of the event— the rhythm, the chants, the beating, and the blood. It was probably someone nearby hitting his head to draw more blood that sprayed the results on me. As I sensed the drops running down my face, in one moment my enthusiasm left me, as if every drop of my own blood had drained from my body. Suddenly forlorn, disgusted, frightened, and sickened, I withdrew from the crowd and found somewhere to sit on the mashmu–m-covered pavement. My friends started looking for me and calling my mobile phone to see if I was okay. At first I didn’t even want to take their calls, preferring to just sit quietly on the street, but they persisted. When they found me, all I wanted to do was go home to my lodgings in Gufool, but they insisted that I stay with them and brought me to a maʾtam. There, I washed my face in the ablution water and rested. While we were there, a professor from Boston University walked in unexpectedly. Professor Raymond, whom I had met the previous evening through Isa, was in Bahrain for research on ʿAshuraʾ. He chatted with us, took a photograph of us all together in the maʾtam, and then gave my friends his card to e-mail him if they wanted a copy of the picture.25 He also invited me to have dinner with him later that day. It was uncanny that the professor would walk into the very maʾtam I was in, arriving just too late to see me sprayed with blood. There’s a familiar-made-strange moment here all by itself, where I was part of the Haydar procession, then not, then brought back into alliance with the Haydariyya by the presence of this outsider who’d just missed out on witnessing my experience. This professor was as strange to me at that moment as anything I had done that day: despite my own disgust for direct contact with others’ blood, I was one of the Haydariyya, if only for a little while.

con s id e rat i o n s “But whatever the level at which one operates, and however intricately, the guiding principle is the same: societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has only to learn how to gain access to them,” said Geertz in his seminal “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.”26 Geertz was

how green can become red

75

writing about the interpretations of the cultural significance of this illegal sport in Bali. Gaining access to interpretations was the biggest challenge I faced while I lived in Bahrain. In hindsight, this spray of blood was an important moment. On my return visits to Bahrain, the thing that people remembered about me and liked to describe was my experience with the procession. I am often asked to retell this story to my friends and their friends. Being sprayed with blood in ʿAshuraʾ and sharing in the suffering of Husayn, or in the struggle for political recognition and power, was a defining moment, especially in the eyes of my interlocutors. Not only did it introduce me to many Shiʿa who later became friends, but it also gave me a greater ease with my presence in Bahrain. Once sprayed with blood, I felt more like I belonged in a way that I did not before. I was anointed with red, in the name of green.

4

The Memory of Date Palm Green Head in the fire, and feet in the water. —Old Bahraini saying about date palms

Standing at Bab Al Bahrain (“the Gateway to Bahrain”), the old customs building designed by Charles Belgrave, and looking north toward the Gulf and Bahrain’s former port, one is faced with the sail-shaped, date palmgreen twin towers of the Bahrain Financial Harbour, the BFH. Why are the BFH towers so green, and more generally how has the color green held such a central role in representing trade in Bahrain throughout the island’s history? Actively drawing associations with London’s Canary Wharf and New York City’s World Financial Center through its marketing and naming, the BFH represents Bahrain’s latest phase of a port: an exchange center for global trade—not necessarily trade in tangible objects—and investment. The BFH’s sail-shaped towers are a hue of green that sits apologetically between the dusty olive of the date palms and the turquoise of the sea that the towers have displaced. Here the use of green is similar to that of the sail motif in that both are historical symbols projecting the image of a bountiful, stable, and verdant past. By referring to a longed-for heritage, the green and sail references link the building’s finance tenants with the riches of the former port. Green is often considered an antidote to the urban. One only has to think of green parks in dense urban settlements, which can offer relief 76

the memory of date palm green

77

from the surrounding “asphalt jungle.” However, greenery in desert areas such as Bahrain is an indicator of human settlements, not relief from the same, due to cultivation of the land through agriculture, orchards, and gardens. Here I use the word urban not to refer to the density of human development but more to indicate interconnectedness and ecologies of human relations. In other words, a city, a town, a village, or even a date palm plantation might be considered urban, depending on its relationship with its adjacencies.1 Admittedly, perceptions of what is urban or rural have changed over time: what might have been considered urban in the past is sometimes considered pastoral today. Bahrain has a long urban history, and the villages of the north and west coasts were in the past centers of commerce and exchange for pearls, fish, and agricultural produce, but the locus of commerce has shifted to the tall green office buildings of Manama: so too the perceptions of what is urban, and indeed what is green. Urban and green are not the opposites one might initially be tempted to think; in fact they require similar infrastructures, such as water, nutrients, and light.

prehistory Archaeological excavations and hundreds of thousands of burial mounds indicate that there have been human settlements in Bahrain for millennia. These settlements were sustained by the agriculture that existed between and within the date palm groves and the network of afla–j, the water channels that irrigated them. Often Bahrainis recount the myth that Bahrain was a regional destination in which to die. Because of the greenery, they claim, Bahrain was perceived as a paradise, “the Land of Eternal Youth,” and site of the Garden of Eden. People would often tell me that the old and the sick from around the Gulf would move to Bahrain to spend their final days and be buried there.2 This, many say, is the reason behind the puzzling quantity of burial mounds, which once numbered somewhere between eighty-five and two hundred thousand (but have been reduced to less than fifteen thousand, possibly as few as eight thousand). The mounds are such a distinctive feature that they have been designated a UNESCO world heritage site.3 Like the date palms, many burial mounds were

78

chapter four

demolished in the post-1970s rush for urban development to built settlements such as Hamad Town and Isa Town. As the burial mounds are preIslamic and considered to be from a pagan age, they are often not considered worth keeping. This is one of the reasons that my interlocutors often cited to explain and justify their destruction. The date palms are no less important for Bahrain’s cultural heritage, and they share a common urban history and fate with the mounds. Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, written in 1905–12, gives an account of the numbers of date palms in all the villages of Bahrain: a total of 236,700 in 1908.4 This was before oil and the rapid urbanization of the 1970s, and at a time when the date palms were presumably at their most numerous. It is fair, therefore, to assume that the “Land of One Million Palms,” as Bahrain is often called, has always been a myth. A senior civil servant told me that that number has been depleted to something like 30,000 specimens today. Yet another civil servant told me that figures available to the Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs assert a total of 572,000 date palms. He claimed they were counted individually from aerial photographs. Two vastly different numbers, and I hope not a case of real versus official figures.

tea r s in a g a r d en Whatever the remaining numbers of date palms, their gray greens are still Bahrain’s most iconic and distinctive hues of green and the most rapidly diminishing. On my first visit to a date palm grove on the north coast near Barbar village, I found my eyes welling up, I was so moved by the power of the neglected garden there. It is the most potent site I visited in Bahrain. “What is it?” asked Isa, who had brought me there. Isa, who describes himself as half Shiʿi and half Sunni—what younger generations call a Su–shi— wanted me to explain the appeal of the space and the intensity of my feeling. “Is it the contrast with the desert? Nostalgia for what used to be there? The neglect of the garden? Its impending destruction? The greenery?” My emotional reaction likely had something to do with a Bahrainbased property developer I had met, Nabil, who had left Lebanon during the civil war. He argued that greenery can be replanted and the same

the memory of date palm green

79

verdant effect quickly generated. He approached greenery as a disposable, fungible commodity. I wish it were that easy. The history of date palm cultivation demonstrates that it is not. Green is an indispensable component of the ageless appeal and significance of Bahrain’s date palm groves. The allure of the gardens is more than the pull of nostalgia, much more than the appeal of a bygone era. Feel the cooling effect of the canopy and the air, touch the spiky textures of the fronds, study the variety, intensity, length, and duration of shadows, and enjoy the memories: the depth and thickness of the hues of green in these gardens enchant. Their majesty, accrued over time, is derived from greenness garnered over millennia of farming and gardening, as well as the microclimate the plantations produce. When the gardens are interfered with, their greenness cannot be recovered. This incident taught me that green has a memory. Green and its perception are informed not just by the neurobiological wiring of the perceivers, or their emotional state, or by the adjacent colors, or light conditions, or textures and hues, or spatial conditions and temporal practice, but by values and perceptions accrued over time by the perceiver. We cannot take the color at face value. Paradoxically, color deceives through its ambiguity, yet is often taken as a symbol of authenticity. Color is not just what we see.5 There is more to green than meets the eye.6 Although Isa considers himself both Sunni and Shiʿi, his family name clearly identifies him as Shiʿi. The Shiʿa are found predominantly along the north and west coasts, in the villages, surrounded by date-palm groves, that have become a locus for Shiʿi resistance. Consequently, the date palm gardens are sometimes seen as Shiʿi spaces. In an effort to break the resistance, many suggest these gardens ought to be developed for housing. Neglected gardens are an obvious target for development, for example, and the argument given is that their development would help alleviate the housing shortage for both Bahrainis and expatriates. Nabil was a proponent of developing such groves for housing; for him the memory of the farming and way of life of the farmers would be present in the new date palm gardens, perhaps even in the green-painted roofs of some of the villas or the turquoise waters of the swimming pools. For Nabil it is progress, but for many who live in the villages adjacent to the date palm gardens, it is a threat not just to their way of life but to the entire nation. The date

80

chapter four

palms are political spaces and derive a lot of their power from their greenness.

date palms The Lebanese anthropologist Fuad Khuri writes that the culture of date palms in Bahrain was historically as elaborate and highly developed as the culture of camels among the pastoral nomads in central Arabia.7 There are over one thousand words in Arabic for camels, indicating their cultural significance, so this is no small claim. It was not uncommon for farmers in Bahrain to give their trees names as they might children, such as Ali, Ahmed, and Abdullah; in this way the trees were treated like family members. The farmer who told me this, when introduced through his grandson Ali, had a date palm in the garden in front of his house in Bilad Al Qadeem. I did not catch the name of the date palm but was served some of its dates with Arabic coffee in the majlis, together with his son, grandson, nephew, and other male members of the household. Other Bahrainis later remarked that this was a great honor, considering that I was a stranger to the family. As we sat and chatted, a message came to the room that the farmer’s wife, unable to come into the male-only majlis, wanted to meet me. She asked for her husband to bring me to the front door of the house when I was leaving so she could see me at close quarters. There, she raised her veil to have a good, long look at me, exposing her elderly face and kind eyes, and presented me with a bowl of dates from the tree to take home. She also gave me some herbal palm water from the nearby factory, a Bahraini specialty. Pollen water, Ma–ʾ al-Luqa–h. , the most popular of the herbal waters, is made from the pollen husks of the date palms, which are boiled and then distilled.8 Al Jaser Factory Company’s brochure states that Ma–ʾ al-Luqa–h. “strengthens the heart, stimulates sexual energy, fights headaches and giddiness, and eases ulcer pains.” It is taken by itself or mixed with tea, up to three cups a day. Sometimes it is used in cooking as a flavoring. There are a few such factories specializing in herbal waters from the gardens—the Al Kamel Factory for Distillation of Pollen Water and Herbs, Bahrain’s oldest herbal water factory, was founded in 1855 in Bilad Al Qadeem—and their shops sell it as a

the memory of date palm green

81

distinctive Bahraini product, as well as h. alwa, a sweet specialty consisting of a jelly made with cornstarch, saffron, and various nuts. The Showaiter family introduced their own variation on the h. alwa recipe and as a result have become synonymous with the confectionary in Bahrain. The farmer’s wife was originally from Busaiteen, an area on the island of Muharraq, which nowadays is adjacent to Bahrain International Airport. That evening, their grandson invited me to Busaiteen for a family gathering. The old homestead was being demolished to make way for a new development of apartments. Six new apartments will bring in much more rental income than an old-fashioned house with a courtyard. What struck me about this gathering was that they were saying goodbye to the tree, not a palm but a tamarind, which they estimated to be two hundred years old. The extended family gathered to say farewell to the tree and not the house. Often planted in the traditional courtyard, the date palm sits at the center, in both the practical and the symbolic sense, of Bahrain’s history of human settlement. Every part of the date palm is edible or of some household use. A farmer with a deeply wrinkled face whose name I don’t remember rhymed off, pointing out each part of the tree, “The dates give seeds for fodder, stems for building, leaves for baskets and houses, fiber for ropes.” A diet of dates provides, it is commonly believed, all the basic nutrients the human body needs. Indeed, there is a popular perception that until the oil boom and the subsequent industrialization and urbanization of the early 1970s, the date was the staple food of Bahrain. No wonder dates were known as the “Mother of Bahrain.” The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said that if you eat seven dates a day you will keep diseases away: “He who has a morning meal of seven ʿajwa dates will not suffer harm that day through toxins or magic.”9 The date is the traditional food with which to break the Ramadan fast: following the Prophet’s example, three dates are consumed at ift. a–r (breaking of the fast), the evening meal traditionally held at sunset every day during the month of Ramadan. Dates also produce a syrup that was traditionally fermented to produce a local alcoholic drink, and the intricate collection process for the syrup is clearly evident in the remnants of the date store at the Bahrain fort, Qalʿat al-Bahrain, a defense structure dating from around 2300 b.c., which remained in use up to the twentieth century. The dates were very urban in

82

chapter four

the sense that they penetrated all aspects of Bahraini life, providing food, shelter, social spaces, social status, and indeed a subject for music, poetry, and folklore. Largely on account of their form, date palms are popularly referred to in English as trees; however, from a botanical sense date palms are strictly speaking not trees. Writing in Laura Rival’s The Social Life of Trees, Roy Ellen tells us why: date palms do not have cambium—the tissue from which trees grow inward and outward, forming their distinctive rings; they have a distinctive adventitious root system, quite different from trees; unlike trees, they rarely have branches; and the stem or truck produces successive leaves from its apex with the base of the leaf sheathing the stem.10 Ellen takes this philosophically, however, and points out that it is not really important if they are trees or not in the strict botanical sense; what matters is what they do: “Thus, when it comes to symbolic considerations, what is most important is not that palms are ‘trees,’ exemplary or not, but that they are salient lifegiving ‘plants.’”11 Ellen quotes the botanist E. J. H. Corner who was more open minded as to what constituted a tree and put date palms in a distinct category of tree that he called “sword trees” because of the leaves.12 In Arabic, date palms are never referred to as trees: they are nakhı–l, or palms. The temperature in the date palm gardens is usually a few degrees lower than that outside the canopy. Dr. Gazi, a scientist who studies the date palms, told me when we met at his office that the temperature is usually only about one or two degrees cooler under the tree canopy, but people usually perceive the difference as greater. The gardens are cooler because of the high water table. The date palm groves conserve water by preventing evaporation, the success of which depends on the thickness of the cover in a symbiotic system. It is worth asking whether the depleted groundwater, resulting in a lower water table overall, affects the temperature in the gardens. I haven’t seen a scientific answer to that question, but the potential loss of natural cooling systems—as well as their shade and their color—is one more source of anxiety for those who hold the date palm dear. With the shade the date palms offer from the scorching sun and the canopy that holds in the moisture from the water channels, the afla–j, the date palms make attractive spaces for social gatherings, especially in the summer months. So while the date palm groves have provided sources

the memory of date palm green

83

of food and employment, they have also been recreation grounds for the elite and their friends and guests. The farmer at whose house I ate dates was not a landowner but a tenant farmer.

so cia l pow e r of pa lm s Owning green land in Bahrain had—and continues to have—complex social meanings and overtones. Large date palm plantations were owned by city merchants who invested in them not for the income or property value, but for the status such ownership conferred. Farmers, mostly of the Baharna, were contracted to look after the gardens at a low cost. For example, Alireza knew of one farmer who paid the owner of the garden “rent” in the form of two small baskets of dates a week and was able to sell the remaining dates and other produce himself. The date palm gardens and agricultural greenery are roughly, but not totally, synonymous; most other crops would be planted among the date palms, benefiting from the shade they cast, with alfalfa foremost among them, joined by figs, mangoes, and pomegranates. Meanwhile, the owner would likely have used the garden every now and then for its social and recreational value. It is important to emphasize that the date palm gardens of the past—like those of the present—were not all that profitable. It was possible to make a living from the date palms, but the returns were not great. One large property just outside Manama in Adhari, for instance, was bought by the Bushehri family in 1943 for 40,000 rupees (about 500,000 dinars or US$1.3 million in today’s money). A small shop in the center of Manama suq at that time, which was considered prime real estate, cost 4,000 rupees, about one tenth the price of the garden. (Incidentally, the dowry of a bride in the ruling al-Khalifa family was then fixed at 400 rupees.)13 The Bushehri family then rented out the garden to a farmer named Khamees Ali Bahrani from the nearby village at a rate of 35 rupees for the first six months and then 20 rupees for the second six months, thereby netting an annual rent of 330 rupees, less than one percent of the value of the property.14 This was not a good financial investment; there were other ways the family could have made money. It is fair to deduce that the purchase must have been made for the social prestige the date palm grove would confer on the owners.

84

chapter four

The ability to retreat on the weekend to the date palm groves was, and still is, the preserve of the elite. Alireza described decadent parties in his uncle’s garden in Budaiya in the 1970s, an area that is now villas. Fuad Khuri describes nakhl parties on Thursday nights during a similar era, where people would drink and dance, and women were allowed.15 (Thursday evenings were part of the Bahraini weekend at that time.)16 Wealthy merchants would bring their families to the date palm groves on weekend afternoons and issue invitations to relatives and friends to join them there until time for the Maghrib prayers at sundown on Friday. Sometimes visiting cards would be issued, granting friends of the merchant permission to visit in their absence. The card would be presented at the gate like an engraved invitation. It was also a tradition among the ʿAjam to go out of the city to a date palm grove on the thirteenth day after Nowruz, the spring equinox. Some families still gather in their gardens on weekends. Abbas, Latif ’s brother-in-law whom I met during Muharram, invited me to visit his family garden in Buri village. Abbas’s family long ago moved from the garden into Manama and its surrounds; however, they still maintain the garden. There, they keep goats and chickens and grow vegetables, which are tended by workers from the Indian subcontinent. The extended family gathers on Fridays for lunch, which can extend through much of the afternoon. They eat lamb and fish accompanied by fresh vegetables from their own garden. The women have their own room, the men another. There’s a swimming pool also, for the men. The patriarch, whom I met briefly, was in his nineties, and his son Abbas expressed concern for the future of the garden after his father’s time, fearing the family would want to sell the garden for development. When I spoke with Abbas some months later, after the old man’s death, he told me the family still kept on meeting in the garden for lunch on Fridays. His family garden is an exception, and the tradition is increasingly rare.

l o s in g the pa lm s In former times the city was seen as separate from the countryside. Alireza tells me that it was in 1971–74 that the countryside and city started to

the memory of date palm green

85

grow together in Bahrain. During that period of industrialization, aided by increased revenue from oil, people mostly stopped going out to the country gardens on the weekends, and city and country gardens subsequently merged in the popular imagination. In fact, people started moving to the gardens and building villas. The garden was no longer “the other,” the retreat, the relief from the city, and instead became part of the city. While the elites stopped going out to the gardens in the 1970s, the attitude of the local Baharna had started shifting as early as the 1940s, with the promise of secure employment in companies like BAPCO (the oil company) and Alba (the aluminum company), which offered a regular wage and sometimes even company housing. Writing in his diary in 1955, Charles Belgrave recounted a visit from His Highness, the ruler, lamenting the decline of interest in agriculture: “HH came in, in rather a bad temper, and talked a great deal about education and the need to teach agriculture in the villages—where nobody wants to learn it as all aspire to be clerks!!”17 Clearly, industry and the civil service had inspired a shift; farmers were understandably more interested in the new jobs and the higher pay and status they offered than in subsistence agriculture. There is a common narrative that the state used industry to break up the resistance that had been forming in the villages and in predominantly Shiʿa areas. Ismaʿil, the historian, explained to me how the island of Muharraq, the former capital of Bahrain, was a Shiʿa stronghold and center for resistance to the state in the 1950s and the 1960s. It was then transformed by neglect of the existing infrastructure in the city coupled with new housing in Riffa close to the royal palaces. The new housing attracted Shiʿa from Muharraq, and Muharraq in turn was populated by Sunnis. The resistance was fragmented. Ismaʿil maintains that the state is currently engaged in a similar strategy, with plans to “upgrade” the villages around the coasts with new housing. Needless to say, new housing will reduce the greenery even more. Many people know what is happening, Ismaʿil said, which is why they insist on the new housing being in the villages. This, however, has the unfortunate side effect of reducing the green areas even more. The special quality of the gardens as particular places was disrupted by the insatiable demand for development that has taken place over the past

86

chapter four

forty-five years. Many people seem resigned to the likelihood that Bahrain’s limited land mass and the demand for land make the continuity of use of the date palm groves, and indeed the date palm groves themselves, untenable. It is important, however, not to overly romanticize the past and to recognize that the loss of date palm gardens is not just a recent phenomenon, although the scale and pace of destruction is certainly unprecedented. Curtis Larsen, in his Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society, cites E. L. Durand, the British political resident in Bushehr, Iran, who made the following observation when visiting Bahrain in 1879: “Foremost amongst the trees is of course the date, and some of the date gardens are extremely fine. Many, however, are going to ruin, the result of bad Government, and indeed in some places that were once flourishing gardens, not a bearing tree remains.”18 Clearly loss of groves is not a new phenomenon; it was part of the national narrative back in 1879 too, their decline attributed to a failure in management. Since that time, the population has been increasing, and the irrigation water from the springs has been declining. It is surprising, therefore, that the groves have been both declining and increasing in area through the twentieth century. Popular assumption has it that the increase in available water, with the drilling of artesian wells which started in the 1930s, led to an increase in irrigation that consequently led to the almost doubling of green areas between 1939 and 1969, when agricultural greenery peaked at 8,207 hectares.19 Although the green areas have been shrinking steadily since the late 1960s, overall Bahrain’s green areas actually shrank from 4,620 hectares in 1939 to 4,042 hectares in 2007, according to geographic information systems (GIS) mapping conducted in 2008 and outlined in Table 3. While there is merit in the observation that the increase in available water led to an increase in agricultural greenery, I suspect that the figures are based on maps that were drawn for illustrative purposes rather than as accurate representations of green areas, so basing GIS calculations on them may not be as accurate as one might like. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, when assessed over the longer time span, the number of green hectares has not at all crashed, and that Bahrain was actually getting greener between 1939 and 1969. Its arc since that time is a return to just under its historic levels.

the memory of date palm green

87

Table 3 Land-Use Types in Bahrain, in Hectares, 1930–2007 #

Land-Use Type

1939

1956

1962

1969

1990

2000

2007

1 2 3 4 5

Agricultural greenery Urban development Industrial areas Service areas Tourism and leisure

4620 562 573 — —

6911 1262 684 — —

7321 1441 707 150 —

8207 2050 765 255 —

6887 8159 1403 1140 16

4365 10175 2060 1500 59

4042 11543 1568 1570 1038

source: Ben Hamouche, 2007

The frequent refrain of Bahrain losing its greenery, that tragedy of lost greatness, of a past that never actually existed as remembered, connects to a larger narrative of oppression and a population that feels disenfranchised. The diminishing date palm groves are seen as synonymous with the diminishing Shiʿa. There is a contrasting narrative, where Sheikh Isa of Bahrain, the father of King Hamad and ruler from 1961 to 1999, is credited as having “turned the country green.” The figures do show that there was an increase in greenery during Sheikh Isa’s reign, so he does deserve this acclaim, however, we do need to closely examine the shades of green.

the dates themselves Traditionally, twenty-two varieties of date palm could commonly be found in Bahrain. Pollination takes place in the spring, and they very predictably yielded fruit from July 15–17 until September 20, each variety in turn. The date harvesting season is not so predictable anymore owing to changes in the climate, and there might be a couple of weeks during the summer in which all—or no—dates are ripe. Alireza has a rule of thumb: “The nicer the shape of the date, the less nice the date.” Khunaizi is Alireza’s favorite variety. Generally, the fruitless male tree is bigger and thicker than the female, on which the dates actually grow. Umm Isa had the dates in her garden tended carefully and told me it cost three to five dinars (about US$8–13) twice a year for the maintenance and by-hand pollination of a solitary date palm. Date palms have almost a human life span and can live for eighty to

88

chapter four

one hundred years. The first harvest is usually after three to four years, and the best harvest is when the date palm is between eight and ten years old. After forty years of age, the quality of the dates starts to decline. When planting date palms, a distance of five meters should be allowed between them. Date palms planted along roadsides are planted in pits of one and a half cubic meters. They are usually watered by tankers or by drip irrigation. Date palms are halophytes—able to grow in saline conditions—and can take very salty water, up to fifteen grams of salt per liter of water (seawater has forty grams of salt per liter). Although date palms suck water from deep in the ground—a four-meter-high tree will have a root ten meters deep—they can be very water dependent. For example, a date palm that is five to eight years old and one to two meters high can use two hundred liters of water per day. Date palms can be replanted, although the process is expensive and the tree requires careful handling and maintenance. If the crown of a date palm is damaged, it will not survive. The roadside date palms usually come from nurseries in the Saudi cities of Qatif, Dammam, Khobar, and Riyadh. Poorer fruiting or common varieties are used along roadsides: the Sefri cultivar (which has yellow fruit) and Khasab cultivar (red fruit). Indigenous Bahraini soil is often poor and in need of replacement, sometimes containing up to 90 percent sand. For example, the soil for the date palms at Al Aali Mall was imported from Saudi Arabia along with the trees. Dr. Gazi told me that Bahrain’s date palms are free of disease due to the salinity in the water, and in the air too perhaps, but this was disputed by nonscientists I talked to, who lamented the disease-ridden date palms.

l e avin g th e g r ov es b e h i n d Contemporary green residential compounds in Bahrain, such as Green Oasis on the Budaiya Highway and Riffa Views, build on desert or on reclaimed land such as Amwaj Island or the Bahrain Financial Harbour. All of these planted compounds, sometimes with green-painted roofs, appear as partial compensation for the date palm groves (or indeed burial mounds) that they replace. Such infrastructural spaces are significant because they are the greenery that most people encounter nowadays in

the memory of date palm green

89

everyday life in Bahrain. They represent not so much the past as the present: the country’s place in the world and its aspirations for the future. The roadside spaces of Bahrain have a strange yet important social value. Take the area adjacent to the former Pearl Roundabout: on weekends and in the evenings, it is not unusual to see expatriates sitting adjacent to the road and quite comfortably having picnics while either savoring or ignoring the high-speed traffic alongside. This is an urban green space that served as a spillover from the Corniche, the former waterfront on the north coast of Manama now lost to reclamation. For instance, the date palms at the Bahrain Financial Harbour are hand pollinated and subsequently harvested for dates by foreign workers, and this same process happens in Budaiya too. This process of informal farming has been reported in other areas of Bahrain too, including areas near the Police Fort in Manama. Together with the shrubs and grasses of roundabouts, roadside strips, and highway medians, these roadside date palms represent the greens of contemporary Bahrain. Even though they are more visible nowadays to Bahrainis in everyday life, they are not the same thing as the date palm groves.

the buffer z one A senior official at the Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs told me that he had developed a proposal for preserving a two-hundred-meterwide buffer zone between the current shoreline on the north coast and any future developments in the land. The zone would protect the drainage from the date palm gardens to the sea, which is threatened with shore-front infrastructure. For example, a proposed road following the north shore along the current Nakheel Road—Palm Road—would, according to this official, kill off the remaining green areas and date palm groves, because the stones and fill required to make the road solid atop reclaimed land would prevent the seepage of water from the gardens toward the coast and into the sea. The gardens would not have easy drainage, and the soil would become too saline even for the halophytic date palms. Other routes for the proposed new road had been investigated, but they were judged not feasible due to the cost of buying the privately owned land and compensating the owners.

90

chapter four

con s id e rat i o n s Green has many shades and hues that carry numerous meanings and associations. Nostalgia for the date palms drives perceptions of green space in Bahrain. Just like the date palm gardens themselves, which thickly permeate Bahraini life through the products and spaces the palms produce, this social memory of the date palm groves is multilayered. The groves are important spaces for economic, political, historical, and aesthetic reasons. They also portray a bygone image of a verdant past. However, the predominant shade of green associated with the date palms is considered passé. New shades of green are becoming more prevalent as symbols of development and of a brighter future. Yet the reality is not so clear cut. The date palm gardens in the past carried many shades of green, from the gray greens of the canopy to a wonderland of greens—and an array of other colors—in an understory containing various crops, fruits, and flowers. They were at their height when Bahrain’s two seas were able to support them with water and a modest population. With the increase in population and the decrease in water resources, the greenness (in an environmental sense) of the palms could be questioned. There is room for nostalgia, but nostalgia should not drive the future. The shades and hues of green carry complex meanings and require equally complex and creative solutions, something that anthropologists, landscape architects, and urban designers should be engaging with more deeply.

5

The Struggle for the Manama Greenbelt It is the best green area of Bahrain. —Report on Preparation of Greater Manama Master Plan

No area in Bahrain shows the paradoxes involved with Bahrain’s greenery better than the Manama greenbelt. The idea of preserving an area of greenery west of the capital originated in the early 1970s, and since then the greenbelt has been a hotly debated issue in Bahrain: to retain greenery or allow development of commercial activity and villas. Almost everyone I asked had an opinion. Almost everyone I asked seemed to be resigned to the fact that, despite laws and intentions of protecting the greenbelt, the greenery will be developed whatever the scenario. Indeed the prodevelopment lobby is eager and anxious to move forward. In 1971, Manama adopted a thirty-year master plan crafted by what is now the Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs, and Urban Planning (then just the Ministry of Works). Designed to allow for the expansion of Manama to accommodate the masses of foreign workers who were predicted to come and have come to Bahrain since then, the plan was spearheaded by a Scottish–born planner, A. M. Munro. In 1968 urban planning was still relatively unknown in Bahrain as a formal discipline. The closest would have been Charles Belgrave and his assemblage of projects ranging from the Bab Al Bahrain building and the various schools, as well as parks and gardens such as the Water Gardens in Gufool and the 91

92

chapter five

causeway over to Muharraq, rather than one overall plan or designated planning system. Bahrain’s first planning project came about when the British Ministry for Overseas Development sent Munro to Bahrain as a planning adviser for two years, shortly before independence. Having been charged with developing a new master plan for Manama, Munro made some initial planning proposals and apparently wrote a report early in his time in Bahrain that proposed a greenbelt to the west of Manama. As soon as he finished the master plan for Manama, he was asked to make a similar plan for Greater Manama, west of the city. This area included the space Munro had proposed as a greenbelt, and Munro allegedly refused to prepare a plan for housing and urbanization in that predominantly gray-green region covered with date palm groves. Munro advocated for their conservation rather than for development. “Most of the people in this region are speculators; they want to make quick money by using planning as a tool,” Munro’s former assistant told me. Munro said it should be a greenbelt and not developed for urbanization. He left Bahrain in June 1970. The assistant, Mr. Kazi, knew Munro before he came to Bahrain. They had met in Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, in Dhaka. Kazi was assistant town planner in Dhaka, and they met in 1967 “for some reason” when Munro was there as well. From his stress on “for some reason,” I got the impression Kazi saw the encounter as more than a chance. By 1970 Kazi was looking for a job and wrote to Munro in London. The letter ended up in Bahrain, where Munro was then posted, and Munro replied, proposing that Kazi come to Bahrain, which he did in February 1971, taking up a position in Munro’s Physical Planning Unit at the Ministry of Works. Kazi was asked to detail the Manama master plan, which he embarked upon immediately.1 Based on the success of the Manama master plan, the moment Kazi was finished with its details, he was asked by his superiors to prepare a similar plan for the area west of Manama, the land that now comprises the greenbelt. This was the plan that Munro had refused to draw up. Despite the expectations of some of those in authority, the planners proposed that the area, mostly date palm gardens, be preserved for the value of its greenery. To this extent, the planners were following planning norms of this time and precedents in London and elsewhere in the Gulf for the establishment of greenbelts. Kazi had studied town planning at Manchester

the struggle for the manama greenbelt

93

University in the United Kingdom, and was deeply affected by the work of Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the eminent town planner who was instrumental in the establishment of the Greater London Green Belt with his Greater London Plan of 1944. The Minister of Works periodically asked Kazi how he was getting on but did not see the work in progress. In telling this story, Kazi pointed out that there were no word processors, no computers, and very rudimentary facilities at that time. Kazi told me that when he eventually presented the plan for a Manama greenbelt to the minister in 1973—the actual document is dated December 3, 1972—the minister and his retinue were shocked that the planning team was not advocating for more development. Kazi and his team had allowed for some expansion around the existing villages that punctuate the greenbelt, this expansion based on a modest projected population growth. Kazi’s argument was simple: there was no need for the land to be developed, and there was no efficient transportation in any case to link it with Manama or the rest of Bahrain. In Kazi’s opinion, the existing zoning for Manama, which he had helped to prepare, would be sufficient for twenty to thirty years of development and population increase in Bahrain. The minister rejected Kazi’s plan. The plan gained little support, and according to one source, another government minister present at a meeting directly insulted Kazi in the presence of the prime minister. The plan was so widely derided that it wasn’t adopted. But the question might well be asked, how come the greenbelt still exists? The idea was as compelling as it was scorned, and it survived via passive momentum rather than force of law or planning, with the term greenbelt frequently used in everyday speech. The greenbelt area was in 1999 officially 896 acres (362.6 hectares), or 20 percent of the green space in the country, of which 76 percent, 678.5 acres (or 274.6 hectares), was covered by active agriculture.2 In 1972, the Greater Manama Plan for this area covered 2,965 acres and had a population of 20,277 in the 1971 census. The report states: The plan covers 2,965 acres of land from Zinj–Burhama (after proposed Manama west ring road) in the east to the road leading to the Bahrain port– Sehla fougiya in the west and from the sea in the north to the extension of sea adjacent to Adari in the south. In this area at present 20,277 (1971 census) people live in 15 different areas all of which are old traditional villages

94

chapter five

except Burhama (detail is given in the last page of the report). All these existing population centres cover 317 acres of land. There is ribbon development of show rooms, garages, workshops, residential areas etc. along Sh. Sulman road from Manama until Shela road. The rest of the area was covered by date palm gardens. It is the best green area of Bahrain.3

The greenbelt was discussed in the cabinet many times and resulted in a ministerial committee consisting of a few ministers to look into the detailed plan and report back to the cabinet. Kazi was the main spokesman to the committee from Physical Planning. “You’d be surprised that the committee agreed 100 percent that the greenbelt should be kept,” said Kazi. Since the 1973 plan, many studies and reports have been conducted, while the greenbelt area has shrunk to about one-third of the area originally proposed under that name. Now most of the green has disappeared through active neglect. The same minister who allegedly insulted Kazi owned land in the proposed greenbelt area and succeeded in having it classified differently. Yet that land is still undeveloped at the time of writing. Kazi told me that one of the fundamental aspects of planning enshrined in British planning law is the idea of consistency and continuity in planning decisions. “Unfortunately,” he told me, “continuity does not exist in Bahrain’s planning environment.” He went on to say that a planning committee had been set up in the 1970s, and at one meeting it was proposed to allow development along the Sheikh Salman Highway, which runs right through the greenbelt. Due to the presence of the then crown prince, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, at the meeting—and expectations of deference to the rulers—Kazi was unable to oppose the idea to change the regulations. Now a five-hundred-foot-wide strip of the road is lined with development on both sides. More recently, in 2006, the planners were given a guideline by the minister of municipalities and agriculture affairs that the remaining greenbelt land ought to be reduced by a further 50 percent. At that time it was agreed that 49 percent of the greenbelt would be preserved as greenbelt and 51 percent released for development. The proposal was that the 49 percent of greenbelt land would be nationalized by the Royal Court, and each of the owners in the designated space compensated with a parcel of developable land on a newly reclaimed artificial island off the north coast. This proposal was never implemented.

the struggle for the manama greenbelt

95

a d i ff e r en t t e mp e ra m en t The main argument for the preservation of the greenbelt centered on the fact that the Manama master plan adequately provided for twenty to thirty years of urban growth, and there was a need for a recreational open space near the dense urban center that Manama would become. It was even suggested by the then minister for education back in the 1970s that greenery was essential for social reasons. Drawing parallels with the temperament of desert-dwelling people as opposed to the green-dwellers, the minister, Dr. Ali Fakhro, said, “The effects on Bahrain of a reduction in the agricultural areas could be disastrous. More serious even than the economic effect of such a change was the social one. Bahrain had been a green land all through its history and agricultural areas had always produced a different temperament of person from the deserts.”4 Despite being designated a greenbelt area, albeit with many modifications and exceptions to the original plan, the green land has dwindled and largely become villas, or desert awaiting villas. It is not uncommon for farmers to refuse to accept irrigation via treated sewage effluent (TSE) and to allow their date palm groves to die of thirst for fear of being compelled to retain the land for agricultural use, unable to achieve its full potential for development. “It is essential in the Muslim religion to protect green,” a Bahraini writer lamented in conversation with me, but individual landowners see no incentive to do so. During my time in Bahrain, I witnessed the death of a palm grove in Zinj, near Gufool in Manama; as I was leaving the country, villas were being built on it. The law states that only 30 percent of agricultural land may be developed; dead date palms are no longer agriculture. As it is illegal, and h. ara–m, to cut down trees, trees are neglected until they die and sometimes are even poisoned with diesel, since the law does not explicitly forbid poisoning trees. In the eyes of the government, even empty agricultural land retains its agricultural classification, but enforcement is poor, and citizens seem more concerned with Qurʾanic law than with the law of the land. As one civil servant told me, “Here, there are penalties if you cut a date palm tree or trees (a fine of 500 dinars), but it is not enforced. It’s the same penalty if you remove one or five hundred trees!”

96

chapter five

One successful Bahraini developer told me, “There is a certain perception that green adds value, and increasingly developers are paying premiums to bring in professionals to lend their names and tacit support for developments such as Riffa Views Signature Estates.” But the greenbelt shows it is not quite as simple as that. Green may be the preserve of the elite, but among the landowners of the greenbelt, the existing greenery is seen as a hindrance to development. Many Bahrainis consider the gardens on the greenbelt “dirty” and backward. “It’s all dirty. It is like desert!” said one official at the Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs. He implied that the greenbelt was a lost cause that ought to be relinquished and cleaned up with “modern” developments with their concrete, asphalt, green lawns, and Astroturf. The issue is not just about green, but the shades of green: the gray green of the date palms is not as popular as the luscious, developed green lawns of villas and roundabouts. The green that this person wants is unsustainable: it is not a problem with green per se, but a problem with the shades of green that people want.

f o r ei gn con s u lta n t s A common critique of foreign consultants is that they try to imagine what clients such as the crown prince or prime minister will want. Consultants who base their work on the imagined expectations of the rulers may overlook the needs of the people who will actually use the space in question. This is not necessarily an issue peculiar to Bahrain or the Gulf region: whoever pays the piper plays the tune, as the saying goes. In terms of urban development, Dubai is often looked to as a trendsetter and a model to follow: “If you point people towards Dubai, they [government leaders] listen,” I heard from James Smith, a foreign-born landscape gardener who regularly consults for the government. He told me that he was advised to use bright colors in office drawings, as the prime minister’s sight is failing. Over and above that, Mr. Smith told me, “Arabs like bright colors.” As a result, he uses bright, often garish colors in his drawings. Bahrain is meanwhile losing one of its iconic national assets. Bahrain’s gray-green areas are extremely complex spaces harboring intricately balanced ecologies, history, and social life—and once destroyed, they cannot

the struggle for the manama greenbelt

97

easily be recreated. It is the complexity of these spaces that makes them so special. A text from 1905 describes a Bahrain that many residents still remember, or can at least still imagine: “The island is a pleasant oasis. . . . The golden-dusted roads which cross it are broad and shaded on either side by long forests of date palms, deepening into an impenetrable greenness, cool with the sound of wind among the great leaves and the tinkle of flowing water.”5 While it is important not to be nostalgic or to try to reconstruct a past that no longer exists, the crucial question remains: how to move forward and adapt green areas for profitable future use. And what might those uses be?

conservation and preservation Any conversation on the Manama greenbelt needs to bring Bahrain’s other green spaces into the discussion. The gardens and the date palm groves of the north and west coasts are all intrinsically related to the greenbelt, as are those of the center and east of the island. Landscapes, as the landscape ecologist Richard T. T. Forman describes them, are made up of patches and corridors and organized in a matrix.6 The connections between green patches need to be maintained and amplified to maintain a thriving ecological basis for the Bahraini landscape. As a consequence, any solution to the fragmented green areas—especially in such a small nation—requires a national approach. Beyond the maintenance of the landscape matrix of Bahrain, government actions are judged on their economic viability and social sustainability. The question of what to conserve, why, and how then becomes more complex. Could thoughtful conservation of the date palms and their way of life, as opposed to their preservation as objects, ever be considered? Conservation and preservation have subtle yet significant differences in meaning, sometimes linked to the difference between seeing a resource pragmatically as productive or as an aesthetic object.7 A productive resource such as the date palm is not only a fruit-producing tree or a canopy for agriculture beneath; its value and meaning to the average Bahraini depends upon its place in the network of social and economic relationships. To conserve the date palm means conserving its network.

98

chapter five

Preservationists, by contrast with conservationists, see the date palm as an aesthetic resource. As such, it stands alone as a botanic specimen devoid of its complex relationship and meaning. Let us first review the underlying forces and reasons for the destruction of the date palms—reasons that are economic, political, and spatial—and then we can best discuss how to use them in the future. In doing so, we might find that a large part of the reason for the destruction of the date palm groves of the Manama greenbelt that has taken place could well be—paradoxically and tragically—the preservationist assumptions of the greenbelters. An approach that recognized the economic, social, cultural, and political values of these spaces and used these values as an agent in their future use may bring more positive results.

n ew “ s pe ci es ” One noticeable new “species” of palm is the camouflaged telecommunications towers springing up in various communities, such as Durrat alBahrain and Riffa. Often much larger than the indigenous palms, they are rarely inconspicuous and often of a deeper shade of green than the palms. They draw more attention to themselves than the aerials they try to hide. These fake trees covered with fake palm fronds rarely have anyone sitting under them in their shade.

l e gal me c h a n i s ms All is not lost, however. Waqf (pl., awqa–f) offers a useful mechanism for the preservation of land ownership, which is employed widely in Bahrain. While home for the majority of the Baharna is usually one of the villages that intersperse the date palm groves, they have developed an ingenious mechanism for the preservation of the date palms. Awqa–f are religious endowments, property donated in perpetuity to all Muslims everywhere. Once designated as waqf, the property cannot legally be bought or sold. Held in trust for everyone of the faith, the groves must remain groves forever. Some ingenious methods have sprung up over the last century to deploy the restrictions imposed by waqf as tools to resist developers, elites, and

the struggle for the manama greenbelt

99

the state. All waqf property in Bahrain is managed by waqf directorates, one Shiʿi and one Sunni, which fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice. Income derived from a waqf is returned for religious use. A tactic that began in 1926 was to register farmland as waqf as a way to prevent its being taken over or sold if the farmer fell on hard times. Due to a cadastral survey—a survey of property boundaries—it became necessary for farmers to prove occupation of land for the previous ten years to retain ownership of their land.8 A large number of Baharna, mostly Shiʿa farmers who did not have deeds to their land, registered their land as waqf as a way of ensuring their future on it, or at least preventing its being taken over by others in positions of power. Many would say that the ruling elites saw the land as private property, and a waqf designation was one way of protecting it from being taken over by the elites. The Shiʿi Waqf Directorate was rebranded in 2014, and the traditional green symbol of the directorate replaced with a neutral golden color. Another means of land preservation and conservation is disputed ownership, termed mughtas. aba (“snatched, taken unlawfully from an original owner”). There was one luscious green area close to where I lived in Gufool that fell under the category of mughtas. aba. The garden from the outside was inaccessible, yet from above it appeared as a green oasis in the otherwise beige desert of Manama. There are many such pockets of land in Bahrain, which remain undeveloped and derelict—but full of vegetation and wildlife—and offer some breathing space from the encroaching urban development. While I don’t think there is an environmental intention behind these disputes, querying ownership where ambiguity exists could be used to delay or defer development.

the value of urban greenery The solution to Bahrain’s complex ecologies of green perhaps lies in part in acknowledging the value of urban greenery. Many case studies exist around the world that can help in understanding the value of green in the context of urban areas. They might range from Singapore, to Central Park and the High Line in New York City, to the research of CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) Space in London. While each

100

chapter five

of these precedents and studies has its own strength, it is important to acknowledge that Bahrain needs a solution distinctive to Bahrain. A common thread of precedent projects is that green spaces add to the livability of places, and consequently to property values and potential for tourism. Anyone familiar with New York City will know, for instance, that Central Park West and the Upper West Side are desirable places to live because of their proximity to the park. Indeed, property speculation was an effective strategy in financing the construction of Central Park. Likewise, the renovation of Bryant Park in the 1990s added 200 percent to property values on buildings immediately adjacent to it (and consequently to property taxes). The transformation of the disused High Line, a former elevated railway line in Manhattan, into a public park is a contemporary example of the value of urban greenery. The High Line was financed by the City of New York, purely on the basis of the projected income from increased tax revenues around the perimeter of the project. This, of course, required some risk on the city’s part, but the massive waves of high-end hotel and residential development indicate that the city’s gamble is paying off and is likely to far exceed the original US$50 million investment. Indeed, several friends have exclaimed how much development has occurred around the High Line. Parts of it no longer have a view because of the new buildings in the way. As a result, arguably, the park itself is no longer as good a park as it used to be. CABE Space, a government body formerly charged with the protection of green space in the United Kingdom, carried out extensive published research on the value of green space. Their publication Does Money Grow on Trees? shows how green spaces add positively to the value of properties and how they can attract investment and people to an area. This is an important publication that not only sets out the economic potential of parks—a theretofore understudied aspect—but demonstrates that the economic components of green space, including direct, indirect, and symbolic values, are essential factors in measures of livability.9

con s id e rat i o n s Possible strategies for the conservation of the Bahraini date palm groves and Manama greenbelt might include designating the remaining green

the struggle for the manama greenbelt

101

areas as a national park and allowing for increased development densities around the perimeter of the park. Alternatively, one might allow for strictly controlled development within the park. The green areas could be used as urban parkland, serving a hugely increased and urbanized population, as well as community gardens and even some leisure and tourist developments. Perhaps something can be learned from the branding strategies of residential developments, having the greenbelt marketed specifically as a tourist destination: “We’re Eden green! Go to Dubai for fake green, we are Paradise.” “To keep Bahrain green, what is needed is agriculture and landscaping!” declared Dr. Youssef at the Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs over tea and biscuits. “These are the ingredients of the greenbelt.” The economic, environmental, touristic, and political value of green adds to the urgency for the creative management of Bahrain’s remaining green areas: to irrigate it responsibly, to keep it alive, to keep it sustainable. Will protection of the green areas raise enough money from increased property taxes for adjacent properties to finance their preservation? Would they become home to “green” developments like Masdar in the U.A.E.? “A plan is only a plan if you can do it. Otherwise, it is only an exercise,” said one planner. The same person went on to lament that “it used to be that green had more value than real estate. But not anymore.”

6

The Promise of Beige Greenery for us was a waste of land. —An urban planner from a government ministry

Isa phoned one evening and arranged to meet me at Dana Mall, near the former Pearl Roundabout, not far from where I lived in Gufool. Dana Mall was built in the late 1990s and is situated roughly midway between Marina Mall and the Seef district, and a straight drive from Isa’s home in Saar on the west of the island. The mall is popular for its several cinemas, which on the weekends especially are filled with Saudis. (Public cinema is forbidden in Saudi Arabia.) I liked to go to Dana Mall because it was easily accessible on foot, about a twenty-minute walk from Gufool, although this particular evening I took one of the new London-style Arabian taxis. The government had just ordered eight hundred of them to clean up the country’s notoriously unreliable and overpriced taxi companies. Dana Mall is surrounded by roads and sand on all four sides, all dusty land reclaimed from the sea and awaiting development. Looking south from the outside of the mall, one can see a fine line of greenery about half a mile away, behind a line of new residential buildings going up across the road. This greenery is the Manama greenbelt, and the line represents the old shoreline and the extent of the palm groves, which used to meet the sea before the reclamation. The land Dana Mall is built on had never been planted with vegetation since it was first reclaimed thirty years 102

the promise of beige

103

before, so it seems especially strange that the food court in the heart of the mall is called the Jungle Food Court: from inside, there is not a single tree, or any bit of greenery, or even a window, in sight. Is jungle a term of anticipation, or is it satire? On the few occasions when it rains in Bahrain—and I witnessed the winter rains myself, softs showers for thirty seconds at a time—parts of the desert turn green. Flora absorb the tiny amount of rain and come alive, filling with green color as they produce enough chlorophyll to sustain them through the heavy heat of the summer. This haze of greenery that quickly covers the desert so excites some Bahrainis that they call it jangily. Jangily is a word mangled from the English jungle through a process of folk etymology. In the same way, for instance, Bahrainis have appropriated wrong side (of the road) to rung sayd, which is a commonly accepted term in Bahraini Arabic. Imagine the excitement after a year of drought and hot temperatures when the greenery appears after a short rain shower. No wonder some Bahrainis take to the desert to picnic on the fine film of green that covers the beige sands. The appropriation of jungle is not just particular to Bahrain. For instance, jangal is the term most often used in Rajasthan for uncultivated and unsettled land, according to Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar. They note that jangal was a common colloquial term for uncultivated areas where greenery might have grown in the past or might grow in the future. Its use in Bahrain may somehow refer to the myth that Bahrain was previously a verdant and lush oasis covered with date palms and the aspiration that it will be so again in the future. Gold and Gujar also remark that despite the word jungle having South Asian roots, its equivalence with jangal is not so clear cut.1 They cite Arjun Appadurai, who elsewhere describes “the radical rupture between our modern Western conception of jungle (as a dank, luxuriant, moist place) and the ancient Indian category, which referred to a dry and austere natural setting, which was nevertheless ideal for human subsistence practices.”2 Appadurai credits the jungle as a complex ecological system where the possibility is what lends potency to the word: possibility of irrigation, of future cultivation, of usefulness. This possibility is essential for understanding the efficacy of beige and its relationship to green. In asking informants about the meanings of jangily, I have routinely found myself stymied. The younger generations I talked to are generally

104

chapter six

unaware of the word, and as one might expect, so too are expatriates. It seems to be used primarily among the ʿAjam, the local Arab-Persian community.

plants in the desert “I feel sorry for them,” a Bahraini-based botanist admitted of his subjects, the desert plants that depend on the all-too-infrequent rains. When the rains do come, the beiges and browns of the desert sands are interrupted with green plants, such as the spiky and leafless shrublet ʿA–gu–l, al-ʿA–qu–l in standard Arabic (Alhagi maurorum), or the gnarled fingers of Kaff Maryam (Anastatica hierochuntica),3 together creating a temporary jangily. Kaff Maryam, otherwise known as Kaff al-ʿAdhra–ʾ, is one of the bestknown desert flowers not just in Bahrain but across the Middle East.4 A member of the Cruciferae or mustard family, it is usually quite small in Bahrain, rarely reaching more than five to ten centimeters in height due to the lack of rain. It is supposed to be only found in Aali, to the southwest of the capital, although it has been reported in the gravelly soils of the central plains and slopes too.5 The tiny white flowers, only about three millimeters wide, typically emerge in March or after the spring rains. Right after the plant flowers, most of the leaves drop and the stems curl inward—like a clenched fist—around the seed pods as the finger-like stems become woody. It can remain in this dried state for months. The plant needs a later infusion of moisture to uncurl its stems and release the seeds, thus ensuring that the seeds will not be released without adequate moisture to germinate them. This second life, as it were, is why Kaff Maryam is also known as the Resurrection Flower. Legend has it that the Virgin Mary held the plant in her hand when delivering Jesus, hence the most widely used name, Kaff Maryam, Hand of Mary. Indeed, the plant has long been used in the Middle East as an aid during childbirth, where the dried stems are boiled in water and the strained broth taken to reduce labor pains. Other uses of the Hand of Mary include protection against the “evil eye.” Sometimes the dried flower is hung on the side of the crib for

the promise of beige

105

infants. They are also sold in bunches in Mecca during hajj. I saw them often for sale in the Manama suq. Passing me a dried flower he had taken from his cupboard, Alireza told me, “Whenever I feel the need, I will buy them.” Alireza told me a story about a wise woman who dispensed folk remedies. “Long ago there was a woman like this in every community,” he said. A recently married woman went to the wise woman in her village and confided in her that she thought her new husband was having an affair. The wise woman gave Kaff Maryam to the young woman and told her to put the dried flower in some water. If the flower did not open up, the young woman’s suspicion was right, and her husband was fooling around. If the Kaff Maryam opened up into a flower, then the suspicion was wrong, and the husband was being faithful to his new wife. (The wise woman knew the plant would open to release its seeds after its immersion in water.) Many desert plants are attributed healing qualities, as evidenced in the Bahraini herbal waters famous for their medicinal properties.

bel grav e a n d b e i g e Beige survives the heat as other colors do not. The summer months have the most beige and the narrowest range of colors, as if the intensity of the heat killed off everything but beige. Writing in his diary during a Bahraini summer, Charles Belgrave comments, “There is practically no colour in the garden now, all the annuals over and the poinciana finished flowering.” (Poinciana, Delonix regia, is especially eye-catching, with bright green leaves contrasting with the bright reds to yellows to oranges of the flowers.) Beige is so nondescript as to be invisible. Belgrave was particularly enamored with the desert and preferred to go paint there in the late afternoons: it seems that he too enjoyed the afternoon light. Yet it is clear from Belgrave’s writing that he associated greenery with a “beauty” much more interesting and notable than the haggard beige surface of the land. Belgrave followed a routine detailed in his diaries, where he captured the passage of time and took note of the seasons in the landscape. His diary bears out his observational skill and the passage of the seasons in

106

chapter six

minute detail. Friday, February 4, 1955: “Gardened after and before tea and James took M and Peggy out for a drive toward Saar, all the desert was green.” Two weeks later, on February 16, 1955, a Wednesday, the desert was still green: “Lovely weather. Gardened after tea and then drove down to Anir with Christopher, Peggy and M, a lovely evening and great stretches of vividly green grass in the desert and many people out there, cars full of women and children in the grass.” In April of the same year, Belgrave wrote again of the country foliage: “Slept after lunch and later drove to Budaiyya, the country looks very nice and green.” In his autobiography, Personal Column, Belgrave wrote: “In the spring, after the rains, though the average rainfall was only two to three inches a year, pale-green grass covered much of the desert and parts of the island were very beautiful.”6 Belgrave did not seem to regard the beige desert as being very beautiful. He had been posted to the Siwa Oasis in Egypt after the First World War, before he was posted to Bahrain. His first book based on this experience, Siwa: The Oasis of Jupiter Ammon, is especially interesting because it contains copies of some of Belgrave’s watercolors. Despite the book being about an oasis, Belgrave hasn’t painted a single tree or bit of greenery, the only greenery being a water jar balanced on a lady’s head. Belgrave appears to have been attracted more to the buildings in the desert. The paintings are all in beige. Perhaps he saw it as his mission to bring in the greenery not just through his pastime of gardening, but through what he and others clearly saw as his “modernizing role.” A 1952 feature on Belgrave in Life magazine—with the incredible title of “He Said Forward to the Backward!”—covered Belgrave’s routine in detail. Belgrave himself was described as a towering but shy figure with a lifelong stammer, despite his position of authority in Bahrain. Interestingly, Belgrave dressed in clothes as striking and colorful as the poincianas in his garden: At 57, Belgrave is an awe-inspiring physical specimen. He stands 6 feet 4 ‘and a bit’ and he carries his 200 pounds of bone and muscle like a guardsman. His taste in clothing does nothing to minimize his size. He avoids the pastel shades or the quiet khaki common in the tropics, preferring to combine gay checked shirts with loud pink ties and horse-blanket plaids. In Bahrain’s bright sunshine Belgrave is clearly visible at a half mile, looking

the promise of beige

107

somewhat like an ambulatory mountain in autumn foliage with just a touch of snow on top.7

the not- green in poetry It is unsurprising that a lack of greenery and the yearning for greenery are common tropes running through contemporary Bahraini poetry.8 I first got in touch with Bahraini poets through the Bahrain Writers Society, on which I stumbled while walking. They are based in a suburban villa in Zinj, to the south of Manama adjacent to the greenbelt, in fact on what used to be greenbelt land. I had arranged an interview with the director of a landscaping firm, and we had gotten the location mixed up: I had gone to his home, whereas he was expecting me at his office, which was quite a distance away. As I walked back toward my home in Gufool, I noticed a sign on a villa: “Bahrain Writers Society.” As the front door was open and I had some time to spare on account of my missed meeting, I walked in and was welcomed by one of the writers on the premises, offered a cup of tea, and enthusiastically introduced to the work of Bahraini poets, among them Ahmed Ajmi and Hameed Al Qaed. I later spent hours in mesmerizing conversation with a poet, let’s call him Mahdi, at the Jawad Dome Food Court, a surprisingly green spot somewhat out of the way on the north coast, surrounded by the remnants of the date palm groves. Mahdi, a sprightly man from the Baharna community in his early fifties, told me how his poet friends would complain, “There is too much green in your work!” At first I thought there was a problem with translation and I was not understanding his heavy Bahraini accent very well, but he insisted that he meant the color green and that he is criticized for having too much of the color in his work. Mahdi elaborated, “When people see a green bird, they see something nice and new coming. When they see green, it is good.” The bird approaching is a compelling metaphor for the promise of something new and green. I asked Mahdi why green was so potent in Bahrain, and he quipped, “Because of the desert!” He told me that greenery is not appreciated by the tribal Arabs, who were originally Bedouin, but it is what made Bahrain famous

108

chapter six

in the Gulf. Because of the green, it was a place people would “escape to” rather than from. Mahdi told me that in Finland the equivalent element is fire, in contrast with the ever present snow; in Ireland, he claimed, it’s the beach, which contrasts with the rainy weather; and in Bahrain it is green, in contrast to the desert. Mahdi told me that in the past there were “too much fishes—you could catch them with your hands. Too much agriculture! Too much water! When you read about Dilmun, they say it is like paradise.” Mahdi told me how rain is “very nice” for poetry, which often gives thanks for the rain. He went on to tell me that rain is synonymous with having sex in Bahrain and in eastern Saudi Arabia. “When it rains,” he explained, “people feel compelled to copulate.” This is such an established phenomenon, according to Mahdi, that across the causeway in Dammam and Jubail in Saudi Arabia the religious police come out in force on university campuses, which are strictly segregated according to gender, any time it rains. Mahdi went on to claim that more babies are born in the months of September and October in Bahrain, nine months after the winter rains. The association between rain and fertility is not unique to Bahrain. Clearly, water irrigates greenery and makes the greenery possible. Water is an essential agent for agriculture and brings new life by association. The struggle between beige desert and greenery is fundamental not only to Islam but to other religions too. Although not directly mentioning the desert, this verse from the Qurʾan stresses the importance of a benevolent God and the “bringing forth” of green: It is He Who sends down water (rain) from the sky, and with it We bring forth vegetation of all kinds, and out if it We bring forth green stalks, from which We bring forth thick clustered grain. And out of the date palm and its spathe come forth clusters of grapes hanging low and near, and gardens of grapes, olives and pomegranates, each similar (in kind) yet different (in variety and taste). Look at their fruits when they begin to bear, and the ripeness thereof. Verily, in these things there are signs for people who believe.9

Later, I met with Ali Abdulla Khalifa, author of “On Saying Goodbye to the Lady in Green,” where the lady in green is of course the majestic date palm. His poem laments her passing:

the promise of beige

109

When the tide smothers you and asphalt laps across your name and you’ve been buried in the brown earth like a dwindling vein you’ll serve as a memorial to a million tall ladies, queens of all the trees that nourish us Once you were wife to the sea where melting with love onto his knees he kissed your feet and went away and rushing back brought you his salty tears to drink You were the servant who supports the house of man, you were the tired traveler’s resting-place standing as mother for the poor in the expensive desert Deeply fingering earth and fumbling sky you gathered the berries of rain clouds with friendly messages from streams and seas and orbs that roll the sky What can I tell the child asleep in my lap if he should glimpse at the field’s end the rays of a palm-frond, somehow left, if he should sing the passionate qasidas of the olden days? What can I say to him, my lady of green? I see the land strip its green badges off and forgot the feasts and festivals of harvest The world has swallowed its nostalgia and calls to the hollow men: “Come here— bring all the tar and concrete you desire.”10

Note the references to the “brown earth” and to the asphalt, tar, and concrete at the beginning and ending, as present-tense conditions, compared to the glorious green past in the middle. Khalifa’s biography asserts that “his poetry stems from the very heart of his Bahraini experience, employing images from the surrounding landscape.”11 Khalifa is also director of

110

chapter six

cultural research at the Royal Court, and we met late at night in the lobby of the Gulf Hotel, one of my favorite meetings places in Bahrain.

th e sa n d In contrast to poets, some people of Bahrain see sandy weather as a good omen. The folk wisdom reports that a sandy spring indicates the dates will have a good harvest. Alireza told me of how at the shah of Iran’s coronation party of 1967, “more than a strong breeze and less than a wind” hit everyone in the face with sand.12 When the sand hit the shah’s face, he smiled. Reza Pahlavi Shah had allowed himself to be crowned only after twenty-five years on the throne, because he wanted to be proud of Iran when he took his formal title. According to Alireza, Persians always believed that a sandstorm was a blessing, and the shah took this as a good omen on the day of his coronation. It did not ultimately do him a lot of good. Over Friday lunch, Umm Isa blamed the American troops crossing the Iraqi desert for stirring up the sand. It was during the first Gulf War in 1991, she told me, that the desert was first disturbed, exacerbating the dust storms in Bahrain, only to be further exacerbated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Sandstorms in Bahrain can last for days on end. People told me that this is only a recent phenomenon, and that in the past the dust storms were not anywhere near as prevalent as they are today. More than one informant blamed the change on the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and reported that the dust stirred up from desert sands was blown into Bahrain for weeks on end. Narratives of how the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and subsequent liberation through “Operation Desert Storm” was felt in Bahrain are also a popular topic; Bahrain is only three hours’ drive from Kuwait over the Saudi causeway. One wonders, are the storms a proxy for war trauma? Is hatred of intrusive sand to be read as hatred of the intrusions of warfare in nearby states? The sandstorms roll in and sometimes stay for days on end, turning the sky yellow and the sun as white as the moon. The color of the sandstorms is one of the most awesome features of life and light in Bahrain. The blue skies, and the air too, get replaced with a haze of yellow not unlike the

the promise of beige

111

Table 4 Visibility during Number of Days with Dust per Year, 1990–2013

Year

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Number of days with dust storm or sand storm (visibility 1000 meters or less)

1 3 7 1 2 0 0 0 0 1 9 1 2 7 4 3 5 5 18 11 5 8 13 2

Number of days with dust (visibility 3000 meters or less)

Number of days with dust (visibility 5000 meters or less)

13 37 29 11 21 2 1 12 3 7 24 6 6 25 15 29 18 31 55 39 38 31 47 21

27 48 51 23 42 5 4 24 4 14 55 12 10 37 29 38 35 47 84 69 63 63 70 35

source: Meteorological Directorate of the Ministry of Transportation and Telecommunications, Kingdom of Bahrain, 2014

images beamed back to us of the atmosphere on Mars. Outdoor life can become extremely unpleasant, and almost everyone is forced inside except for the poorest and unluckiest workers. Those low-income workers who cannot avoid spending time outside cover their mouths and noses with scarves. Rain, if it comes, keeps the dust down; many people lament that the rains appear to be less frequent than they used to be. There is some truth in

112

chapter six

this lament: the prevalence of dust storms has increased significantly since the beginning of the century. The year 2008 was the worst on record, with eighteen days with dust or sandstorms and a visibility of one thousand meters or less. That same year, there were fifty-five days with visibility of three thousand meters, and eighty-seven days with visibility of five thousand meters.13 Since it tamps down the dust, rain keeps the highways clean. When it doesn’t rain, the desert is hard to erase from the roads. If 1.5 percent of Bahrain’s land surface is covered by highways, this adds up to an area of about 11.5 square kilometers or 4.4 square miles.14 The King Hamad Highway, leading past the villages of Askar and Jaww, as well as the Shaikh Isa Air Base, leading to Durrat al-Bahrain in the south of the island, for instance, is regularly covered by streaks of beige sand blown from the desert on either side of the road. The winds blow the sand onto the highways, leaving drifts on the asphalt, and the lack of regular traffic allows these drifts to accumulate. Even elsewhere, where the roads are cleaned either deliberately on a schedule or through constant traffic, the line between the road and the dusty shoulder is ambiguous, not unlike that both-and-neither zone between land and sea. I regularly encountered this dusty zone on my walks from Gufool through Naim on the way to Manama. The beige dust is common in both low-income and high-income areas. In high-income areas, people don’t walk, so sidewalks are not required. In Juffair, which is mainly populated with Western expatriates and Saudis, who invariably drive, there is no pavement. After visiting a nightclub in Juffair one evening with a Bahraini friend, I wrote in my diary, “And the funny thing was that in the short walk from the car to the hotel, my shoes got covered in sand. Absolutely white! There are no pavements there, you see.”15 I subsequently heard stories in Kuwait of how the sand along the highways there used to be sprayed green before it was planted with grass, showing the importance of green beyond vegetation.

d es i re lin e s A government official first explained the concept of VIP roads over a cup of lemon tea at one of the ministries. “VIP roads,” he said, “are given extra-

the promise of beige

113

special attention as they are the routes normally used by members of the government and the royal family.” VIP roads are concentrated around Riffa, where the palaces of the king, his wives, and extended al-Khalifa family are located. The VIP roads tend to be greener and brighter, with more date palms and flower beds than non-VIP roads. The bedded flowers are, as mentioned in Chapter 3, invariably red and white, the Bahraini national colors. Clear and unobstructed views aid in security. VIP roads are designed for cars, not for pedestrians; the traces of those who do walk thus become more obvious, and the desert peeks through, not just on top of the asphalt, but through the greenery too. The finely manicured median strips, shoulders, and roundabouts of Bahrain’s VIP roads often display desire lines—the worn grasses exposing the soil beneath and betraying the routes taken by low-income workers who use these spaces not just for recreation but as conduits for their everyday lives. Traces of the desert are brought to the surface, liberated from the film of greenery by the walking workers. Walkers are forced to the sidelines in a land where contemporary planning is geared to the car. The rule of thumb seems to be that the more exclusive the mall, hotel, or residential development in Bahrain, the less accessible it is by foot. Both Seef Mall and City Centre Mall, the most exclusive malls in Bahrain, where the middle classes perambulate on weekends, are more or less inaccessible to nondrivers. No public bus services go there, or stop nearby, despite their proximity to the capital. There are no footpaths either. Bollywood movies cost up to four times more at Seef than at the Indian movie theater, al-Hamra, in the center of Manama. Walking is mostly not a choice but a necessity: only low-income people walk. Footpaths, if they exist, are not protected from the intense sun, although during the winter months especially the weather can be quite comfortable and pleasant. But the traces of those who do walk are etched in the beige and brown pathways peeking through the greenery. I know from experience. Having walked to Seef from Gufool, I faced the “wall” of the highway. Either you turn back or you take your life into your hands and wait for a break in the traffic. It is not unusual for people to lose their lives attempting to cross; as a result of this grisly hazard, the government has recently erected fences on the median strips to keep the walkers safely away from cars and segregated from those who can afford cars.

114

chapter six

desert camping The lure of the absence of green can be seen in the mass migration of Bahrainis to the desert for “camping” during the winter months. Tens of thousands of people, mostly unmarried men in their late teens and twenties, converge on the desert during the winter. There they play video games, watch television, eat Bahraini food, smoke shı–sha, and socialize with friends. The tents are usually connected to electricity generators and by and large have sewage connections. Some may even bring servants to care for them. Camping in the desert is not without its home comforts. My male friends in Kuwait go to beach houses along the coast in winter, although there too the same phenomenon of desert camping exists. I found the concept strange. Why would people go to the desert to camp, and not to the parks and green landscapes such as the date palm groves? My informants reported they needed to feel attached to the desert. Some told me they went to the desert for camping to experience something of the nomadic lifestyle their ancestors enjoyed. It brings them back to their roots, they say. Others claim there are no green areas to go to, so they need to go to the desert. Obviously, the desert contains some appeal. So, too, is there appeal in camping, although I should note that rarely does anyone sleep in the tents. They descend on the desert after work and evening prayers and stay quite late, with almost everyone going home by midnight.

f i el d s of p l ay The spaces where Bahrainis play sports such as football on Friday and Saturday afternoons are sandy. I mean they are fields of sand— arid, ungreened. The underlying economics of green are clear: why would scarce and valuable land be used for something as utilitarian and unprofitable as community soccer? Few communities can afford the irrigation of football pitches. Casual weekend games occur on the desert sands.

the promise of beige

115

The Bahrain Rugby Club, by contrast, with its green playing fields, eschews any visible sand, as do most formal sports clubs. Sited in Janabiyah, near the causeway to Saudi Arabia, the Bahrain Rugby Club is a base for a mainly expatriate population. Teams from Qatar, Al Ain, Sharjah, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Muscat, Riyadh, and of course, Bahrain compete for the cup. Why do all these teams play in Bahrain? Isa said it was because of the relaxed rules on the consumption of alcohol outdoors compared to other locations around the Gulf. The green pitches in Janabiyah replaced the former pitch of crushed coral located on the site of Bahrain International Airport, in Muharraq. It is also much more convenient for the Irish and British who often live in the area.

tr ee of l i f e The Tree of Life has become one of the main tourist attractions in Bahrain, yet in 101 Things to Do in Bahrain it is listed as number 99. This solitary – tree, the Tree of Life (Shajarat al-H . aya), is significant because it has no known water sources nearby. No other greenery grows nearby either, which makes the tree a further puzzle. Located in the center of the island and about two kilometers from Jabal Al Dukhan (Mountain of Smoke), the highest point in Bahrain, the tree is surrounded entirely by desert. Its seeming waterlessness has given it a mythical status in Bahrain. Some locals consider it so miraculous that they conclude the tree must indicate the site of the Garden of Eden. There is a Hindu shrine nearby, and a Bahraini friend who told me about the shrine as we climbed nearby Jabal Al Dukhan implied an association between the shrine and the Tree of Life. Flat-topped with pendulous branches, this halophytic tree is a Prosopis juliflora, a relative of the Central American mesquite.16 According to Diana Charles Phillips, an amateur botanist, Prosopis juliflora is native to the western part of the Americas and is well adapted to soil conditions in Bahrain and elsewhere in Arabia. It is often planted along roadsides in Bahrain and is common in the south, particularly near Sakhir. There is a grove near Sakhir Palace that is a haven for birds, both migratory and native birds.17 The tree takes its significance from the contrast with the surrounding desert.

116

chapter six

g ol d v er s u s b ei g e Why is the color of Gulf Air gold and not green, red, or black? Because gold is a neutral color, a more upmarket beige. It took me some time to realize that Gold City in the suq was named not for the gold merchants but for the neutrality of the gold. The Shiʿa Waqf Directorate changed its color from green to gold, perhaps in an attempt at a more inclusive approach.

th e de s er t o f r ol la s q ua re When I first visited Rolla Square in Sharjah, the emirate next to Dubai, it was very beige and very well used. I was told that it had previously been green, with a grass lawn and a series of banyan trees, which give the park its name: al-rawla means “banyan” in Arabic. But the government decided that the greenery attracted too many “bachelors,” a term used for lowincome workers from the Indian subcontinent. These bachelors tended to live in the nearby area, and Rolla Square is close to the bus station, the transit hub for buses and vans leaving for other locations around the Gulf. Sharjah’s low rents provide cheap accommodation for many of Dubai’s low-income workers and, indeed, tourists. To discourage bachelors, the green grass was uprooted. The idea was that if it were less green, it would be less attractive as a public space. Whether they intended for families to use the space or for no one to use it at all, the degreenification failed in its task: the low-income workers did not seem to mind the desert and took shelter beside the fountain or under the large banyan trees, perhaps feeling at home under these trees of Indian origin. The square’s proximity in the heart of Sharjah, as well as the two lines of banyan trees offering shade from the harsh sun and a locus for assembly, made the square continue to be a gathering space for low-income workers. The square has been redeveloped since my fieldwork year, and the reopening was presided over on December 2, 2014, the National Day of the United Arab Emirates, by Dr. Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed al-Qasimi, ruler of Sharjah. Media reports of the opening suggest a verdant and family-friendly space.18 Indeed, the beiges have been replaced with concrete paving and green grass and shrubs, and the park is now fenced off from

the promise of beige

117

the surrounding streets. The fence separates middle-class families and expatriates like myself, who perambulate inside the park, from the lowincome bachelors outside. Guards at the gate control who has access to the park, which is open till 8 p.m. daily. It struck me as odd that the park would close so early, as many parks in the Gulf are active much later in the day, to take advantage of the evening cool. Perhaps families do not want to be out so late when there are scary “bachelors” about.

th e b eige me ta p h or i n c h ur c h Christian churches in Bahrain are not exempt from the potential of beige to become green. The Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart is the largest church in Bahrain: such are the crowds attending the Easter ceremonies that a special outdoor vigil is staged annually on the dusty grounds of the Sacred Heart School, in Isa Town near the National Stadium. Buses bring the faithful from the mother church on Isa Al Kabeer Avenue in the center of Manama to the school, about twenty minutes’ drive south. Easter follows Lent, the commemoration of Jesus’s forty days of fasting in the desert. He spent his last night in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the metaphor of desert versus greenery is ever-present in the Easter story. Indeed, in his weekly Angelus address in December 2009 before the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Pope Benedict XVI quoted Saint Ambrose, patron saint of Milan: “So the Word descended so that the earth, which before was a desert, produced fruit for us.” The pope went on to say, “In the Church there is an ongoing struggle between the desert and the garden, between sin which dries up the land and the grace that irrigates it so it may produce abundant fruits of holiness.”19 At the Bahraini Easter ceremonies, the clergy carefully announced in seven languages, including English, that Holy Communion should be received only by baptized Catholics in good conscience, suggesting that a large portion of the congregation gathered in the desert night were not Catholic at all. The Catholic church in Manama is popular with Hindus, who go there for the abundance of statues. I met Michel and his wife, Samia, after the 5 p.m. Easter Sunday Mass at the Sacred Heart Church in Manama. They were recently married Chaldean Christians from Syria and had been living in Bahrain for a couple of years,

118

chapter six

fleeing the political strife in their homeland. They invited me to share an Easter dinner with them at their home in an apartment building on Exhibition Road. On the way there, we stopped by the market adjacent to the church for fresh fish and vegetables. Getting alcohol was more complicated, however, as we were too late for the off-license on Exhibition Road; in the end, Michel bribed a hotel doorman to get six bottles of beer from the hotel bar. Over dinner they described for me in great and longing detail Michel’s father’s farm in Syria, by all accounts a luscious place in which all sorts of fruits and vegetables and greenery grew. I found it in stark contrast to the beigeness of Exhibition Road, where they then lived. They did not have a lot of good fortune after moving to Bahrain; they had started a restaurant, but the business did not survive.

beige buildings Traditionally, summer housing was in dusty gray-brown colored huts made from date palm fronds, called barasti. Coral reefs from the shallow Gulf waters provided lightweight and insulating building materials, giving form to winter housing. This light gray coral was covered with mud and a local limestone whitewash. The production of whitewash took place at Aali village, and the manufacturing process was described in detail by the Danish archaeological expeditions in the 1950s and 1960s, a process that changed little for generations: “Limestone was quarried from the bedrock and transported by donkey cart to the place in front of the large burial mounds. The blocks of stone were stacked with layers of palmwood in between, with parallel draught channels at the bottom. A fire was lit in each of these, and gradually ate its way through limestone and wood and turned it into a large white pile. The charcoal was removed, and accompanied by rhythmic singing the remaining mass beaten to a powder with a long implement. The material was then sieved and bagged.”20 Today, however, the predominant building color in Bahrain by far is beige. From the Al Fateh Mosque, to Seef and Géant shopping malls, to schools and private homes, such as my lodgings in Gufool, the all-pervasive Bahraini beige comes in a variety of shades and hues. “Actually, we are getting bored with them,” said Alireza of the plethora of beige buildings, includ-

the promise of beige

119

ing his own. “There is one old building in Manama, and the owner painted the balcony yellow. And it is so beautiful! Unique! Suddenly yellow!” But why beige? Why not the traditional white? Or yellow? Or green? Looking carefully at buildings, I noticed that they changed color over time, even during the short space of a year. The beige sand becomes ingrained in the surface of the paint: to maintain any color other than beige requires a rigorous schedule of washing and regular repainting. Although buildings are constructed from materials other than desert, the desert still catches up with them. “In Manama new buildings of shining white plaster have replaced mud hovels,” wrote James Bell in Life magazine in 1952, as he tried to emphasize the modernization of Bahrain from what he described as “a crumbling mud town filled with noisy people who lived in incredible filth.”21 In the late 2000s Isa’s family constructed new concrete houses of a contemporary design and painted them brilliant white, and he reports that it is a constant struggle to keep the beige at bay.

con s id e rat i o n s One wonders if beige would not be a better color for the environmental movement in Bahrain and the Gulf rather than green? Given beige’s predominance in the natural and urban landscape and the ease with which it exists, it would seem a much more environmentally friendly color. Green is present in beige through its promise, a promise fulfilled and maintained through water. Manama and Muharraq are as beige as the desert, al-barr. Historically, Manama, like many other cities around the world, did not have much green. Historical paintings of Manama as well as contemporary aerial photos show shades of beige predominating. Beige is a color not just of the desert but of cities too. Moments of green have immense resonance in such beige deserts, urban and rural. Cities, through their barrenness, can often be likened to deserts. Beige has similar relevance as in desert areas, not always through its presence but through its promise of a better future.

7

Brightening Green In a desert there is nothing better than to see a green lawn. Nothing better! —Homeowner at Riffa Views residential development

Different voices have different values of green. The old-fashioned gray greens of the date palm groves and greenbelt are being replaced by brighter hues of green, such as lawns, roadside strips, and shrubberies. They are symbols of aspiration, progress, and changing hegemonies, and they represent different forms of production that supplant and disrupt traditional ecologies. Bright green is still, as in tradition, a social catalyst, as various garden contests link competitive spirit to greenery. The Bahrain Gardening Club reflects an enduring interest in all things green and beautiful. “Together let us make Bahrain Green,” urge the organizers of the Riffa Views Bahrain International Garden Show, who also sponsor an annual garden design competition among Bahraini schools, compellingly called “The Riffa Views Eden Challenge.” The International Garden Show, which runs for three days every year, was one of just three events in Bahrain under the direct patronage of King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa. Indeed, the king’s wife, Sheikha Sabika, is a regular participant in the show and has publicly thanked the king for his initiative in keeping the country green.1

120

brightening green

121

green deserts “Green deserts” can be defined as areas of vegetation, often monocultures like grass lawns, composed of species that do not interact with their surrounding environment. Just like agricultural green, green deserts require certain infrastructures to sustain them and have important social and aesthetic values in arid urban settings. While from a purely environmental perspective these spaces are often at best useless—and even have a negative environmental value, considering the copious amount of water, pesticides, energy, and time that is often required to maintain them—from aesthetic, social, and even political perspectives, they have value, and therefore by extension have a practical purpose. Green deserts can take many shapes and forms. Here I will explore just a few examples: roundabouts and roadside strips, residential developments, and public parks in Bahrain, and— for comparison’s sake—a few in the United Arab Emirates. Despite the presence and the charisma of green, the desert is hard to keep out of these carefully curated spaces. Aesthetic values of green drive economic factors, which often become the drivers of the greenery and the building development that they prettify. The greenery for new developments often precedes the development itself, such as Riffa Views. Advertisements for new developments often show more greenery than buildings. Why so, unless green has value? Paradoxically, however, the Gulf ’s green deserts are erroneously considered important contributions to the environmental ecologies of cities. Green is equated with environmentalism, yet green is not always green from an environmental point of view. This chapter explores the agency of bright green in some of these spaces in the context of Bahrain and the Gulf more generally. The Gulf is one of the most arid—and beige—regions in the world, which nevertheless, with few exceptions, constructs luscious greenery in tandem with its growing urbanism. The reciprocal relationship of the growth of green and development is very clear, but green and sustainable are clearly not synonymous. A significant component of the green spaces is their color, and a greater and more nuanced awareness of color, especially of green, is essential for truly sustainable development of the urban built environment.

122

chapter seven

con s truct i n g a g r e en d e s er t Green deserts do not come easy. The plants that cover urban roundabouts and roadside grass strips demand irrigation, maintenance by manual labor, and pesticides. Indeed, green deserts by definition have a negative environmental impact due to their resource intensity and lack of connection to a larger ecology. This is particularly true in the cities of the Gulf. The contrast between indigenous green values, such as those represented in agricultural areas and date palm groves, and the values represented by the brighter hues in green deserts such as median strips, roundabouts, and public parks, is striking. As different as their values are, however, the date palm gardens and the traffic spaces satisfy similar social needs. The roadside green deserts are in some ways the date palm groves of the present. Date palm groves are, of course, agricultural, producing tangible (and delicious) goods, whereas the green roadsides indicate an economic productivity, a production of development, a landscape of transformation and of the power of the state.

r ecr e ation Ilias, my landlord’s driver, often drove me if I needed to go longer distances out of the reach of my feet or the bus. One day, as we traveled thirty minutes south to the University of Bahrain in Zallaq, where I was to give a lecture, I asked Ilias what urgent issue the government should address in Bahrain right then. It was before the Arab Spring and uprising of 2011, although there were already political tensions in Bahrain by then. Without a pause, Ilias replied, “More green space! If only there was more green space in the country, everything would be okay. It would take away the boredom. People would not have to travel.” Ilias, a Pakistani-born bachelor in his midtwenties and a Sunni, thought there was not a lot to do in the tiny city-state. Ilias associated his limited recreation time with greenery. Indeed, Ilias told me that he spent much of his Fridays—Friday is part of the weekend in Bahrain—with his friends chatting, smoking, and drinking Coca-Cola (he told me he drank up to twenty cans a day) on the green grass roadside

brightening green

123

strips and roundabouts that line the highways he traversed on his daily drives. Sometimes he would play basketball in one of a network of green parks recently constructed in the country. The parks, Ilias’s friend told me, were constructed to ease political tensions. Ilias considered himself better off than many of his compatriots—he told me he came from “nothing” to owning his own car and informal taxi business and speaking English within three short years. He told me he occasionally left Bahrain on weekends for greener locations, such as Dubai and Doha, but he was sure that if only there were more green space in Bahrain, he would have less reason to travel abroad. (Ilias’s social group, I should add, does not take part in desert camping.) Ilias’s reply really surprised me, and I did not really believe him when he said he traveled abroad just for the greenery. Indeed, it made me wonder whether our many previous conversations as we drove through Bahrain in his black Lexus had somehow prejudiced his answer. Methodological concerns aside, it was still an interesting response. Ilias is not alone in seeing green as a welcome relief from the dryness of the desert and the underlying harshness of the climate, whether that climate be meteorological, social, or political. Ilias is one of the hundreds of thousands of low-income workers from the subcontinent who spend their Fridays on such leftover green spaces all over the Gulf. Their presence indicates that there are certain values attached to green in public areas. What especially strikes me about Ilias’s response is that he felt Bahrain’s not uncomplicated political situation would be resolved with more greenery. The several constituencies in Bahrain have very different yet often overlapping spatial patterns and uses of outdoor spaces. Ilias represents arguably the largest and most disenfranchised group, the transient lowincome workers who have little to no chance of long-term employment, citizenship, or the right to vote. Yet such temporary workers make up almost half the population at any one time and are the most visible users of the roadside green spaces. The roadside shoulders and roundabouts that trim and frame the road and highway infrastructures of the Gulf are important spaces and provide the most exposure to “landscape” that many people receive. One such space is the former Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain, now reconfigured, which was the center for the political uprisings that followed the Arab

124

chapter seven

Spring. This roundabout was a typical example of a green desert in a city and one with clear relevance to the politics of green. The roundabout was the main traffic interchange of Manama, a very busy junction with what could only be assumed would be limited environmental value. The roundabout comprised an island surrounded by a busy highway and in the center the iconic Pearl Monument.2 I cannot imagine a gazelle freely grazing in the center of the roundabout, never mind a camel, or a bird for that matter. With few wild or natural species, the space was a green desert. Little could survive there in any case with the incessant traffic. Similar to many other roundabouts in Bahrain, the Pearl Roundabout and the area around it were nonetheless a magnet for people in the evenings and on weekends, when expatriate workers such as Ilias and his friends and other foreigners, including Arabs from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, would gather on the greenery. The use of public green space in Bahrain was and is highly stratified socially; several affluent Bahrainis told me that no Bahraini would use these sorts of spaces for recreation. One friend indignantly insisted that only foreigners would congregate in such leftover spaces, insisting they must be Qataris not Bahrainis. However, the social use was restricted to weekends and evenings: when the sun went down, the spaces became much more usable. Low-income workers from the subcontinent would use them, and families would gather there for picnics. What seems distinctive about the social value of such spaces is that they are green. The green becomes an attractor. But the spaces have social values beyond their occasional recreational use on evenings and weekends. I have heard stories of how expatriate workers would pollinate the date palms planted there and along the nearby Corniche (which has since been lost to road widening) in the springtime in order to harvest the dates in the fall. I have heard of another example where the center of the roundabout at Seef Mall became a soccer pitch for the local youth, a practice that has since ended with the reconfiguration of the space as a junction. Ilias’s comments are especially pertinent when contrasted with the Arab Spring and political uprisings. Many people, including my interlocutors in the ministry, told me that official unease with groups of unrelated people gathering in public was one of the reasons for the lack of publicly accessible open space in Manama. In the capital it is no exaggeration to say the only open spaces are those along the highways and on round-

brightening green

125

abouts. Such spaces give the illusion of open space, but the endless traffic keeps them inaccessible to most of the public, although Ilias and his friends and others did manage to go there on weekends.

pa r k s a n d le a d er s h i p The city centers of Manama and Muharraq were historically not very green. Old maps and black-and-white photographs confirm high urban density and insufficient space for green to grow between buildings, although it is obviously hard to tell if green was prevalent as a color. Watercolors by Charles Belgrave show no green in the suq whatsoever, although he may not be a reliable source. Often the only greenery in his paintings is in the clothing.3 Walking though the respective suqs of Manama and Muharraq today, one does not find much greenery at all apart from the stores selling fresh vegetables and the odd tree or weed pushing its way through the cracks in the pavement. Such weeds are often valued and allowed to grow, despite seeming out of place.4 The Bahraini suqs lack the sheer quantities of green shades, shutters, and awnings of the streets of al-Azhar, the historic quarter in Cairo, but there are many green shutters and occasional green doors and many green neon signs, in partial compensation perhaps for the lack of plants or soft greenery in the city. In contrast with the suq, green has a history of being associated with ideas of progress, however flawed these ideas might be. In his autobiography, published in 1960, Charles Belgrave recounted the view of Manama from the boat upon his first arrival in Bahrain in 1926: “Looking across the brilliant blue water from the deck of the Patrick Stewart, on the morning of our arrival, I saw a squat line of mud-coloured houses along the shore with no buildings of any height, no minarets and nothing green, except westward where date-groves came down to the water’s edge. Today a wide road runs along the sea front lined with high white houses with deep-shadowed verandas, the skyline is pierced with tall minarets and in places there are groups of trees among the buildings.”5 On his final departure from Bahrain by airplane thirty-one years later, Belgrave wrote in his journal: “Dawn was breaking and I saw, dimly, far down below, the causeway between Manama and Muharraq, which had taken me eleven years to build, the straight wide

126

chapter seven

roads, the new piers, the schools, which had sometimes been such a source of trouble, the hospitals, and the lights in the towns and villages, supplied by the new Power House. I saw our home, surrounded by tall trees which I had planted, and in the distance, I saw the Sheikh’s white palace, and I felt a deep sadness at leaving him, and Bahrain.”6 Belgrave, who as advisor to the ruler was effectively prime minister of Bahrain for over thirty years, clearly saw green as a symbol of development. He was proud of the green he had introduced to Manama, including the trees around his house (across the road from the British Embassy on Government Avenue, which was then on the seafront and today is wellinland). His interventions and improvements to parks in Bahrain are well known, such as Adhari Park and the Baghcheh in Manama. The Baghcheh was the old Persian garden (ba–ghcheh means “small garden” in Persian) that is seen on old maps of Manama and was restored by Belgrave. Sadly, the garden was later eaten up by the city: temporary housing was erected there while a school was being built nearby; the housing became permanent, and the garden was lost. Although the park had already existed for a long time, Belgrave considered himself to have beautified it. Likewise, he beautified the Water Garden in Gufool: “This used to be an unhealthy swamp on the outskirts of Manama. I had recently made it into a public garden with lakes, paths, bridges and pavilions, and I planted it with flowering shrubs and trees.”7 Nowadays, the association of greenery with the rulers continues. It is not uncommon for people to say there was no green in Bahrain before Sheikh Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa, the father of the current king. Sheikh Isa ruled as emir from 1961 until his sudden death in 1999, and his rule coincided with huge changes in the green landscape of Bahrain. Many point out that the period of Sheikh Isa’s reign was instrumental in encouraging the destruction of greenery through the increased development that took place in Bahrain during those years. There is some truth in both points of view, as in the wake of the drilling of artesian wells by Major Holmes, the irrigation capacity of Bahrain increased, and consequently the area of greenery doubled between 1939 and 1969 (which also coincides mostly with the reign of Sheikh Isa’s father, Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa). However, since 1969, with the urbanization of the 1970s and consequent drop in the groundwater levels and

brightening green

127

increase in the water’s salinity due to overextraction, the percentage of green areas has been decreasing.8 But these green spaces are the areas of gardens and date palms. Comments on how Sheikh Isa brought green to Bahrain usually relate to green lawns, roadside strips, and so on, and not to the date palms that were already there. Thus in the popular imagination the date palms are not really green or not green enough: their greenness is antiquated. The date palms represent an old, bygone, unprofitable green, whereas manicured grass represents a brighter future. The hues of green have changed, and so have the values attached to them.

con tra s t w i t h t h e g u lf In the sense that Sheikh Isa is credited with greening Bahrain, he appears to parallel his peer, Sheikh Zayed, the founding father of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Zayed—who helped finance Zayed Town in Bahrain in the 1990s—clearly saw green as a symbol of development; his ambition was to turn the UAE green. His quotes are often presented as models for living, for example: “They used to say that agriculture has no future [in the UAE], but with God’s blessing and our determination, we have succeeded in transforming this desert into a green land.”9 Having hailed from the oasis of Al Ain, on the border with Oman, Sheikh Zayed is famous for his fondness for greenery. The proximity of Al Ain to Buraimi across the border highlights the striking contrast in greenery between the districts. Al Ain is verdant, luscious, and well irrigated. By contrast, I observed the shortage of water in Buraimi as palpable, and the date palms appeared to me to be dry and gray. Sheikh Zayed’s love for green is often attributed to the oasis; however, he also visited England. The British architect John Elliott recalled, “One day Zayed turned up to see this little garden and we became very close through this whole gardening thing. I was explaining to him how Abu Dhabi should really have parks and that there should be tree-lined boulevards. He loved England. He used to go there a lot. He loved the green. I would like to think that I was one of the contributing factors to Abu Dhabi being green.”10 Kuwait has also followed Sheikh Zayed’s lead. I am told the emir of Kuwait returned from a visit to Abu Dhabi and Al Ain with the

128

chapter seven

idea to green Kuwait, saying, “I wish Kuwait was interested in greenery.”11 Plans to green the country were interrupted by the Iraqi invasion in 1990; however, in 1995 a twenty-year plan for greening Kuwait was prepared, the only such plan in the Gulf, although it was never implemented. Part of the plan was to lay out (or plant) a greenbelt around the capital, but to this day Kuwait City is still bordered by dusty white desert sands. The idea was that a greenbelt would provide an environmental ring, a buffer, around the city. “We are still waiting on the TSE,” said one Kuwaiti civil servant, indicating that when TSE is available, the greenbelt will be planted. Kuwait has recently followed up with a plan for “greening the desert.” It has not yet been implemented. In 2008 the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid al-Maktoum, decreed that all new buildings in Dubai must conform to green criteria. This surely has to be one of the biggest ironies in the Gulf—one of the most environmentally damaging urban environments in the world proclaiming the necessity of green. But Dubai has to catch up with Abu Dhabi, its wealthier neighbor, which intends to become a completely “green” city—even though Abu Dhabi is already literally very green. One important strategy for “greening” the city is to green the edges of the roadways where people drive on a daily basis. Dubai is doing this, and so is Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait, and Bahrain. People like Ilias, whose experience of the outdoors is mostly from the motor car, would have more experience of this type of green in the new green city of the Gulf.

advertising Advertising and global positioning have become new infrastructures of green. The representation of green in a future project can transport the viewer to other worlds, creating fractured geographies, places that echo other, faraway places. “It’s like Scotland, minus the weather,” claimed an advertisement for Riffa Views, a luscious green residential development built on top of the desert.12 These fractured geographies are largely responsible for the sense of fantasy in the Gulf ’s urbanism. Advertising for new developments typically uses green to sell the project. Sometimes a higher percentage of the image is given over to green spaces than to the

brightening green

129

buildings that are apparently for sale; sometimes the image consists of only greenery and no buildings at all. Once the real landscape is built, rarely is it as green as the image. While there are many examples of green-themed developments in Bahrain, such as Green Oasis on Budaiya Road and Riffa Views, Green Community in Dubai is a classic example and helpful for a comparison. Issues of green are not just particular to Bahrain but have similar resonance in other Gulf states. Situated about thirty miles from the Dubai clock tower—which used to be the reference point for distances in Dubai— Green Community contrasts with the Greens, another development in Dubai: Green Community is a bit greener, and a “very luscious” green at that. Although the Greens is more expensive per square foot, due to the proximity to Dubai, it is likely that the price of real estate explains the relative shortage of green at the Greens. A luxuriant gated development situated in Dubai Investment Park, Green Community was formerly desert some thirty minutes’ drive from downtown Dubai. Several residents told me that its greenness compensated for the inconvenient distance from the city center. Getting to Green Community by public transport was an ordeal. I was staying in Sharjah, the emirate just east of Dubai, where everything is a bit cheaper, including hotel rooms. My hosts in Green Community—whom I knew through a mutual friend—explained that the best way to get there would be to make my way to the Mall of the Emirates, and from there take a ten- or fifteen-minute taxi ride. Traffic permitting, it can be fifteen minutes by car to Dubai from Sharjah and about thirty minutes to the Mall of the Emirates. I took a bus, riding through Dubai along Sheikh Zayed Road, the city’s main artery. I told the bus driver I wanted to get off at the Mall of the Emirates, and he told me that was no problem. It was a Friday, and the bus was filled with low-income workers; many, he told me, were going to the mall. When I got dropped off near the Mall of the Emirates, I could cross the road and find a taxi outside the mall. With the heat and the lack of oxygen on the overcrowded minibus, I fell asleep soon after we left Sharjah and awoke only when the bus stopped to drop me off. Sleepy-eyed, I stumbled to the front of the bus and stepped out. All of a sudden, I found myself alone—no one else got off—and still a bit dazed from my nap. There I was on the grass bordering the roadside,

130

chapter seven

with the eight-lane Sheikh Zayed Highway between me and the Mall of the Emirates. I had to get to the mall. Cars flew past one after the other, far too quickly for me to dart between them. I was stranded on the green grass shoulder, unable and admittedly unwilling to even attempt to run across an eight-lane highway. Not only were the cars passing at high speed, but despite what the bus driver had told me, there was a fence at the far side of the road to prevent anyone getting to the mall. After an hour and a half—which seemed like an age in the hot midday sun—a passing taxi driver abruptly stopped and called for me to hop in. He told me that he felt pity for me and knew if he didn’t pick me up I would be stuck there for a week. He brought me directly to Green Community. Needless to say, I was very happy to be rescued from the green grass roadside desert! Incidentally, I did not see any fauna there. This was one shoulder that not even people could get to: greenery, greenery everywhere, and no water or shade. . . . Its primary use was aesthetic, to frame the highway and contrast with it, to be seen briefly and from a distance. When I arrived at Green Community, I was desperately thirsty. The hues of green in Green Community, an island of greenery surrounded by desert, seem to be amplified to the extreme in order to make not just the desert more hospitable but also the distance from the city more palatable. Here the greenness relates to color rather than to sustainability. With street names such as Gardenia Lane and Tulip Avenue, Green Community is like something straight out of Desperate Housewives, a television show filmed in California, another desert region. And so were the people, who tended to be mostly expatriate heterosexual couples in their thirties and forties. There were some single people, some retired couples, but the large majority were midlife couples with kids. The immediate context of the community was the beige UAE desert, but the wider context was the greenness of middle-class values and aspirations. I first went to Green Community to meet with a mixed expatriate-Arab couple called George and Maha, who were friends of friends. We rendezvoused at the local shopping center and sat outside beside the lake, next to a Friday lunchtime concert. In between the Brit pop and birdsong, they told me they had moved to Green Community largely for the greenery. They loved living there: they loved the lawns, the sprinklers, the public spaces, their own decadent green garden, which compensated for the dis-

brightening green

131

tance from their work in Dubai and the long and sometimes quite unpredictable commute. They brought up the Greens, that rival development, and called it a marketing ploy. There was little to no green in the Greens other than the name itself, they told me. By contrast, Green Community was so luscious that even the CEO of the development firm lived there, they said. Green Community West, then under construction, would be even greener. During our conversation it emerged that George and Maha’s utility bill had just arrived in the mail that morning and the cost of their water usage had soared as a result of irrigating the greenery in their garden. This increase was despite using treated water (TSE), which is delivered in a separate system from potable water and billed at a lower cost. The bill led to a somewhat heated discussion between Maha and George on the merits of watering the garden, until they remembered that they had company. Clearly embarrassed by their exchange, and the fact that they had temporarily forgotten me, they separately made their excuses and went off to look after their children. Maha left first, followed by George a few minutes later. When I next had news of Maha and George through our mutual friend, I was told they had replaced their green lawn with Astroturf. I spent the rest of that afternoon in Green Community walking around and speaking with local residents gathered for a community event centered around a buffet lunch and, when the live music ended, piped-in music. Green Community is gated, so there was no fear of unwanted guests. I was clearly an expatriate too, so I did not seem suspicious: people assumed I was a resident or a guest of a resident. The developer, Union Properties, had its offices on site, a source of pride for residents. Mr. and Mrs. White, residents of Green Community, told me that green was a big factor in their choice to live in Green Community. “It’s not like the chaos outside,” said Mr. White, a retired sailor. “It’s quiet apart from the birds.” They were also happy that there were no mosques nearby, so the adha–n (call to prayer) would not distract them or disturb the night’s sleep. They explained that the early morning call to prayer is a big issue for expatriates. The lack of a mosque also prevented, he said, “Arabs moving in.” Mr. White told me that they paid 100,000 British pounds for their two-bedroom apartment in 2006, and by 2008, the apartment had tripled in value. “There’s nowhere like it in Dubai,” he said.

132

chapter seven

Green Community is an exception. The greenery in Green Community as illustrated in the promotional literature is not that different from the reality as constructed. Both show an unlikely verdancy that is hard to obtain without copious irrigation, maintenance, and pesticides. They are designed to show the special nature of the place, its contrast with the surrounding desert. Time and time again during my year living in and traveling around the Gulf, I heard that green and Islam are indelibly linked. I heard that green is a sacred color, and its creation in the built environment is linked to the Islamic heritage of the region. People like to say that the creation of green space is somehow a religious obligation or a celebration of Islamic heritage, rather than due to any sort of practical or aesthetic concern. As one informant told me, “Muslims have a personal connection to the color green. . . . Allah paints his a–ya–t [signs of nature] in a tapestry of green all over the world.” And, oddly, this metaphor is often used in developments where few devout Muslims live.

as p i ratio na l g a r d en i d e a s I queried whether a U.S.-based Arab American academic had encountered the phrase “water, greenery, and a beautiful face.” I received the following reply by e-mail: “Absolutely, man, from my dad since I was like nine or ten. It’s what Arab American immigrant men say when they sit in their backyards with their wife and a sprinkler turned on, lol. It’s the Arab American interpretation of the American dream (maybe the equivalent of that other triad, mom, the flag, and apple pie?).”13 Clearly, the phrase has farreaching resonance. Such ideas impact the development of private spaces and the public domain. I heard many references to the value of green while I lived in Bahrain, such as “Recreational parks like Adhari are gold mines for investors.” The use of green to mark the civility of urban development, as promoted by Charles Belgrave, continues today. A plethora of new real estate developments in Bahrain such as Riffa Views, Durrat alBahrain, Amwaj Island, and Dilmunia typically deploy the color green to claim prestige, luxury, and comfort. The brighter the greenery, the greater

brightening green

133

the compensation for the dusty hues of date palm groves or the latent greenery of the deserts they displace.

r i f fa v iew s The 207-hectare, thousand-home Riffa Views Signature Estates is, according to its former website (in capital letters, in case we miss it): “A ‘green community’ taking shape.” “Because if it’s not remarkable it will become invisible,” the website added.14 Advertising often shows more greenery than a project can deliver. Residents’ testimonies indicate that a large part of what makes the housing estate remarkable is the greenness, which provides contrast to the indigenous desert landscape. Riffa Views’ very own TV channel, RVTV, shows a desert and promises it will be transformed into a verdant golf course called the Royal Golf Course. “We liked very much the idea that if you look out the window you can see grass, and that is very pleasant,” said Mrs. Brown, a homeowner at Riffa Views. “I imagined it like an oasis in the middle of the desert,” said Mrs. Dunne, also a homeowner. “It’s out in the open, so you feel as if you are in the country, and everywhere you go there is a highway. . . . We like the open space. We like to be able to see green in the desert. . . . In a desert there is nothing better than to see a green lawn. Nothing better!”15 The bright blue greens of new residential developments such as Riffa Views, together with roundabouts, roadside strips, and highway medians, present contemporary Bahrain’s predominant hues of green. Yet a visit to the completed golf course shows a turf remarkably less green than the images used to market it. And the villas have little to no green around them. Dilmunia is another contemporary Bahraini development. Unlike most developments in Bahrain, Dilmunia makes a direct case for the link between greenery and health. The promotional literature for the development tells us, “A day in the life of a resident of Dilmunia will be a wonderfully radical departure from the ordinary life in any other community. Rising from a night of restful slumber, she stretches and refreshes herself in a bedroom well-insulated from the noise of the hectic world outside. Looking out of the window, she deeply inhales the freshly oxygenated air

134

chapter seven

from the forest of trees surrounding her home, while being serenaded by the sweet morning calls of birds roosting close by.”16 It is hard to say whether people actually think that arid environments are short on oxygen or whether the forest of trees will be as oxygenated as the brochure, and renderings, suggest.

w h at gr ee n s pa c e s d o The stereotype in the Gulf is that green spaces are built to replicate green spaces in “the West.” I heard many comments that green areas such as Mamzar Park in Dubai were built in reference to Hyde Park in London or Central Park in New York. The phenomenon is sometimes attributed to Arabs following a Western model because they think it is superior. Alternately, some informants argue that there is no local precedent for a Khaliji public park, since such a model does not exist, so Arabs naturally look to London or elsewhere for their model. Yet another take is that these types of parks are mostly designed by Western consultants, whose ideal public space is green—and not just any green, but bright green at that. I heard this explanation especially from architects and developers, who often blamed foreign consultants for all the bright greens in the built environment. These professionals assumed that since most of the consultants are “Western,” they could not design anything other than a park following a Western model. However, while I do not want to dispute the validity of these explanations because they are what informants say and believe, I must provide my own, more nuanced explanation based on my experiences: greenery is simply the biggest change you can make in the desert. To turn desert green is to transform it beyond recognition—to make something useless into something useful and seemingly productive. Thus the impetus is to make it as green as possible. My Khaliji friends who live in London tend to live in Knightsbridge, Kensington, Notting Hill, and Bayswater, all areas surrounding Hyde Park. While these people spend hours in the park itself, especially in the summer—when the wafts of ʿu–d, an ingredient in Arabic perfume, mingle with the smell of cut grass, bearing witness to the sheer number of Arabs in the park—the very same people tell me they would never dream of visit-

brightening green

135

ing a park in the Gulf. Isa told me that parks in the Gulf are full of the “middle classes”: it would be beneath him and his standing in life to be seen in such a space. Isa laments the passing of the date palm groves. His comment emphasizes the fact that the date palm groves were recreation grounds for the elites, as well as agricultural areas for the working classes. They were not parks for the public or for the aspiring middle classes, and their passing is often not lamented by the middle classes, as these spaces were not part of their world.

more on advertising A survey of Bahrain’s Batelco telephone directory shows that green is by far the most popular color associated with companies in Bahrain, with fiftyfour entries listed in the directory. Company names include Al Sondos Green Stores, Black & Green Boutique, and Eco Green Waters Purification. Blue follows in a close second place, with forty-five entries. White has fortytwo, and black twenty-six, the same as red. For some reason, a meager three businesses have yellow in their name.17 I used to walk past one store called Green Stores almost every day in Manama suq. The business, a garage located on Lulu Avenue on the edge of the suq, was painted a very peculiar shade of green. Mr. Ahmadi, the owner, told me: “The reason for the name Green Stores is that my father started the business from 1958. We were purchasing oil from BP [British Petroleum] and distributing it for them, at that time they painted our shop with green color which was the BP’s color and since very few shops were in the market the people recognized our store with the green store, since then we became famous with the name Green Stores, and we registered our name in the Ministry by that name.”18 Green Stores is especially interesting on account of having other greencolored buildings in its proximity, unlike elsewhere in Manama, as if the initial green building had acted as a catalyst for others. Apparently one of these nearby buildings belonged to Green Stores. However, on a subsequent visit to Bahrain, I discovered that Green Stores was no more. The whole building was painted beige with only a sliver of the original green peeking through. Fortunately, the green color was still predominant on the street, showing that color indeed has spatial values and memory.

136

chapter seven

i n terio r g r ee n Green, from what I have seen, does not feature much in interiors in Bahrain, apart from the lobby of the Ritz Carlton hotel, which is a soft pastel green. The prime minister is said to frequent the lobby, quietly sipping coffee or tea in a corner. Someone suggested to me that the lobby is green to temper the heat outside, because “in a warmer climate, green has a cooling effect.” John R. Stilgoe writes about the soothing and calming effects of green in interiors: “In the first two decades of the twentieth century, experts advised men to have their kitchens painted apple-green. The experts believed that apple-green quieted nervous people, and especially wives beginning to think of suffrage, of careers beyond the home. Today the explorer of color schemes finds in old houses and apartments the applegreen paint still gracing the inside of the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and the hallways of old police stations and insane asylums.”19 I suspect this lack of green in Bahraini interiors has something to do with the color green paint turns under direct sunlight: it looks like bile.

d ev el ope r s a n d p r of i t “Arabs don’t respond to green—they respond to air conditioning,” claimed one Australian-born developer involved in the Bahrain Bay reclamation project beside the former Manama Corniche. His observation was that Arabs buying property never ask him about the area of green space that accompanies a property; this question is the sole domain of expatriates. He went on to repeat the old adage “Blue and green should never be seen, except with a color in between.” The saying suggests that blue and green clash, and they should never be paired unless with another color to neutralize the pairing. In answer to a question of why the imagery in advertising development is often greener than the real thing, the developer said the architects were often in places like New York and had certain verdant images in mind when constructing their renderings. As the artist Angela Bullock has said, “If the grass isn’t green enough, we have to paint it greener to enhance it.”20 Also, the greenery appeals to expatriate investors, an important market base. The reality will never be quite as green as

brightening green

137

the images used to market it. “Developers often get greedy and green areas get reduced” in favor of building square footage, he admitted. The developer went on to tell me that in a “good” (I understood him to mean expatriate) not-very-built-up area, 60–65 percent of net usable space is built on, so 35 percent is open or green space. He told me, for instance, that customers choose a hotel based on what they do in their spare time, and greenery plays a big role in indicating the availability of recreational activities. So images of quality hotels show greenery. Another architect / developer told me that people expect about 20–30 percent of a development to be open space, and if it is open space they expect it to be green, never beige. However, rarely is any thought given to ongoing maintenance costs or where the irrigation water will come from over the long term. In contrast to other developers I met, this particular developer, a Palestinian who described himself as “a developer with a conscience,” told me that for Arabs greenery is important. “In Arab culture,” he said, “the garden is fantastic, something to aspire to.” Yet he added ruefully that greenery did not add much to the sales price, adding that although he was trying to break the mold, he still had to answer to the investors who expect profits and “can say no” when he proposes too much greenery or too much open space. The main issue with the provision of greenery is the price. “It costs 80–100 dinars per square meter [about US$212–$275] for ‘landscaping’ in a built-up area. One square meter of landscape costs more than architecture!” lamented the developer.

g r een s pa c e b y t h e me t er A rhetoric common among designers, developers, and planners in Bahrain is that green and the environment are intertwined. For example, a government document arguing for sustainable urban development states that “investment in green spaces is an integral part of responsible urban development.”21 The Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) master plan, which was drawn up to guide Bahrain’s development for twenty years, has “to Green the Country” as one of its ten objectives. The plan envisaged a 1,400 percent increase in green parkland, from 14 square kilometers in 2001 to 244 square kilometers by 2030.

138

chapter seven

The ninth focus of the master plan for the country puts forward the following objectives: • Enrich existing and new urban environments with parks, plazas, and streetscapes.

• New parks in every governate. • Create green roadways to accommodate expanded tree planting, creating shadows and pleasant pedestrian environments and strengthened civic identity.

• A new generation of plazas and public spaces will enhance the public realm for pedestrians.

• Allow one-third of agriculture lands to be developed. • Provide areas of linear open spaces, or conservation corridors, to link the open spaces and serve as open space boundaries to urban areas. 22

The tenth objective, to “promote a sustainable future,” does not admit to any conflict with the objective that immediately precedes it. Indeed, the SOM plan appears to go back and forth between literal and figurative use of green, so that pursuit of greenery, even by unsustainable means, elides neatly into pursuit of sustainability. It is not uncommon for consultants to use such verbal tricks or at least to have a gigantic blind spot in the middle of their plans.

some more religious associations Mohja Kahf tells us that it is common among Kuwaiti women to wear green on hajj.23 Kahf writes about the freedom offered to women by the Islamic pilgrimage of hajj, where normal clothing codes and restrictions do not apply. Although men have strict clothing guidelines for the pilgrimage, requiring a singular piece of white clothing, these codes do not apply to women, who can and do abandon the black hijab in favor of vibrant colors— hence the title of the essay, “Purple Ihram and the Feminine Beatitudes of Hajj.”24 There are, surprisingly, just eight direct references to green in the Qurʾan. The trees of paradise are “dark and green (in colour),” for instance.25 Even without direct reference, Islam uses green imagery routinely. Greenery is

brightening green

139

not just in the domain of Muslims, though. The Hindu temple deep within the side streets of Manama suq, dating from the 1850s, is—three guesses— green. The row of Pentecostal churches in Villas in Adliya includes one church that Jane, Alireza’s wife, attends. The road, nicknamed “Church Row,” is thick in foliage. There are numerous other churches in Bahrain, such as the Anglican cathedral and the various Coptic churches. The sparse and sandy Zoroastrian cemetery in Nabih Saleh, gifted by then ruler Sheikh Salman in 1955, is an exception. Alireza told me that some people approached Sheikh Salman’s son and successor, Sheikh Isa, saying that this cemetery was too big for a community of less than thirty persons. Sheikh Isa informed the community that “my father has given you the land and no one is allowed to take it from you, not even me.”

con s id e rat i o n s As the aesthetics of green move from color to environmentalism, creative strategies that include subjectivities may prove fundamental in curating the desire for greenery toward a more sustainable future. The symbolic power of green and greenery cannot and should not be underestimated in Bahrain’s arid environment. “Green means a source of water for Bedouins,” Mahdi the poet reminded me, pointing out how the appearance of green can allude to the promise of another world. Indeed, as the Australian-born property developer told me, green space is a monument in Bahrain: “To beautify in Europe is to put in a monument. Here, it is to make it green.”

8

The Whiteness of Green the convergence of colors The land is silver and the sea is pearl. —Old Bahraini saying

In summing up the paradoxes of green, this concluding chapter positions green within discussions of landscape and the city. It is framed around white and the contribution of green to whiteness, in the sense that white is, rather than the absence of color, the coming together of all colors.

sn o w in b a h ra i n It was the month of May, and the oppressive summer temperatures were descending upon Bahrain, so it was becoming increasingly difficult to walk outdoors. As the outside temperature rises above body temperature, the heat becomes oppressive, pressing on the skin and making even short walks physically challenging. I was on my way to Isa’s house, and as I sat on the number 86 bus from Manama in the east to Budaiya in the west, chatting with a Filipina housemaid called Polly, I noticed the bus driver had a couple of photographs pinned up in front of the driver’s seat. Presumably taken on a family skiing holiday in Europe, in the photos the driver and his children were posing in the snow and standing beside a snowman they had obviously just built. I imagined that the fractured geographies of the image 140

the whiteness of green

141

of the cool white snow offered the driver some relief from the oppressive heat and limited air conditioning in the bus. It reminded me of the indoor ski slope I had visited in Dubai some months before. White was an antidote of sorts to the brilliant sun and soaring temperatures outside; the white snow allowed the driver to imagine another reality. In the same way that white offered the bus driver a space for imagination and escape, green offers the capacity for dreaming too. Green, like white for the bus driver, provides a space for imagination. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” and “Faraway hills look green” are just a couple of sayings that indicate the agency of green and its appeal to the imagination. Not to mention, of course, the aforementioned Arabic adage, “Three things take away sadness: water, greenery, and a beautiful face.” It was in the early summer that I came to realize that the power of green in Bahrain is related to the seasons. I did most of my fieldwork in the autumn, winter, and spring, when the landscape is most usable and pleasant, and indeed walkable; that is not the case from May on, when the outside temperatures become almost intolerable. It was then I noticed the inversion of green with white. What in the winter and spring is a color of longing and pleasure, a green that makes people so excited they call it jangily, becomes burned out and much less exciting in the summer. Green becomes much harder to maintain then, with many greens turning brown in the Bahraini summer heat. This scorched earth is something seen mostly from cars, or at nighttime when people go outdoors. Except for the date palms that provide shade, daytime green by and large stops existing during the summer months, and those who go outdoors during the day do so mostly because they have to.

garden party For an expatriate, the seasons are in many ways inverted in Bahrain. The ladies of the gardening club, modeled on the Royal Horticultural Society, grow roses and perennials in the winter months, as the climate then is closer to the British summer. Dahlias flower in March in Bahrain, whereas it is September or October when they come out in England. The Bahrain International Garden Show competition is held in the spring, usually in

142

chapter eight

February or March, and the annual garden prizes are awarded in the spring too, when gardens are at their most resplendent. Umm Isa invited me to a ladies-only party on a March afternoon, having received the host’s permission in advance to bring a male guest. The fact that I was an expatriate academic seemed to make my presence at the gathering of women acceptable; I can’t imagine a Bahraini male being welcome. The garden was adjacent to the Sheikh Salman Highway, in the district of Zinj, on the edge of the Manama greenbelt. In fact, the garden would, not long before, have been a date palm plantation, and was now a development of villas situated within the five-hundred-meter-wide strip of land that was designated for development following the greenbelt’s establishment in the early 1970s. While Umm Isa boasted with her friends and fellow competitors about her son and his various achievements, I walked around the garden, which had round tables set out for afternoon tea, complete with starched tablecloths, silverware, and china. A buffet of Indian food was offered under a canopy. Many of the sixty to seventy ladies—the leaders of the Bahraini gardening world—avoided eye contact with me, whereas a couple of them were intrigued to find an expatriate male guest in their midst and approached me. One was Isa’s aunt, who came over to me asking who I was. Another inquired, “Are you a reporter for the Gulf Daily News?” On finding out that I was Irish, yet another lady told me she had been to Ireland on a “what do you call it? You know, the thing where you move between bars . . . ? Oh, yes, I have it . . . I was on a pub crawl. Have you ever been on a pub crawl?” As we sipped Earl Grey from the china cups, Umm Isa and her friends explained to me some of the intrigue surrounding the judging of the garden competition and the confusion created by the decision of the king’s wife to enter the competition, which many felt put unfair pressure on the judges. This springtime gathering was the end of the gardening season, a final event before the Bahraini summer would arrive. Summer is almost a winter, as “nothing will grow,” and a time when those who can afford to leave Bahrain do so, for London, Geneva, Paris, or other places with more temperate climates. The gardens are left fallow, to be revived again in the autumn, along with the garden parties and judging, on a schedule opposite from Europe’s seasons.

the whiteness of green

143

For a garden to work properly, the orientation, I was told by the owner, a regular winner of the Bahrain Garden Competition, is very important. She told me that the north of the garden is cooler in Bahrain due to the shade it typically affords, away from direct sunlight. Shading material can hold back 70 percent of the heat from the sun. During the summer, the garden would be mostly grass and shrubs, the annuals gone with the heat, although periwinkles and hibiscus can survive the summer heat quite well. Hidden behind high walls that contribute to its shading and ensure the privacy of the garden and its place among spaces of the elites, this winning garden appeared like an English country garden, a colorful oasis amid the harsh Bahraini sands.

r el ationa li t i e s White embodies the convergence of colors.1 This chapter is about white and its relationship to green. The aim of this book is to address the “urbanism of landscape”—in other words, to investigate the infrastructural and cultural milieu within which green landscape is embedded in the citystate of Bahrain. Landscape requires infrastructure that extends through the boundaries of the spaces we see and enjoy, often into the hinterlands and regions beyond. A primary aim, therefore, is to show that landscape, when perceived through color, reveals aspects of relationships previously hidden. Infrastructures, as well as colors, interplay and take meaning from one another. In the desert, it is not uncommon for walls and fences—or property dividers—to be marked with green, in contrast to the prevailing white and beige landscape. The opposite might happen if the landscape were green. In more temperate landscapes, for instance, we build walls and fences and paint them white in contrast to the green grass and vegetation on either side. In Bahrain, walls in desert areas are often painted green in contrast to the white and beige sands: the contrast clearly distinguishes property boundaries. One cannot help but wonder if the former white Pearl Monument—the Bahraini focus for the uprising that followed the Arab Spring in 2011—would have achieved such symbolic significance if it had not contrasted with the green beneath. Had the white monument

144

chapter eight

been sited on white desert, would there have been as powerful a metaphor, or as compelling a case for its destruction?

g r een a s a c o mp o n en t o f t h e c i t y As a color, green does not exist by itself: it is a mix of blue and yellow. Colors have subjective boundaries, and where blue becomes green or green becomes yellow depends to a large extent on the culture and background of the perceiver, as well as the lighting, the time of day, the material that happens to be green (or perceived as green), the distance from which the color is being viewed and the surrounding context, and importantly for a study of the city, the surrounding colors. Green would not exist without blue or yellow, just as the green in the landscape would not exist without sunlight or water for irrigation. Anthropologists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay wrote in 1969 about the relativity of color across languages. They identified a series of phases through which a language must pass as its color vocabulary increases: a word for green almost always exists, even when a word for blue does not.2 In fact, when they refer to green, it may include blue greens, blues, and blue purple.3 Let’s take this relationality a little further. If landscape is green, then urbanism is presumably everything else, mostly grays, beiges, and whites. But green is urban too. Traditional green spaces clearly add to livability, and consequently to property values and the potential for the generation of revenue. Green is more than a catalyst for development, economic value, and exclusivity. Green generates memories, provides gathering spaces outside of private homes, and has a productive capacity of its own. In desert areas, where the indigenous landscape tends to be beige rather than green, green is especially potent through its promise of transformation. There, green is synonymous with urbanism, rather than considered as the “other” or the antidote to urbanism. The phrase landscape urbanism contains at least two potential meanings. As an adjective-noun compound, where urbanism is the noun and landscape the adjective that modifies it, landscape urbanism might be a landscape approach to urbanism, in the same way as social anthropology is a particular branch of anthropology. If landscape urbanism is a noun-

the whiteness of green

145

noun compound, then it is the coming together of two relatively equivalent disciplines, like city planning. For landscape to replace architecture as the building block of urbanism, then, recognition of the role of landscape as a generator of urbanism is fundamental. Employing the two words as equally powerful nouns allows them to be productive in tension rather than one overruling the other. In looking toward an urbanized, transdisciplinary, multiscalar world that a noun-noun compound would advocate, let us keep in mind the inherent urbanism of green. Reading color provides a method of reading the city decentered from the form of objects alone and recentered on its relationships and ecologies.

col or a n d s pa c e Color is an essential component of the urban built environment, with a value often underestimated or taken for granted. What if grass were blue? Or trees pink? If human skin were green? Or asphalt yellow? It would be a very strange world indeed.4 The visual perception of a city is strongly informed by color, leading to expectations, prejudices, and eventually design decisions made when planning and shaping urban form. Few city planners would design a yellow roadway, even though a yellow road is technically feasible. For what aspiration and dreams would people choose to live or invest in a community called “Red Community,” “Black Community,” even “Pink Community”? The symbolic values of color are very powerful, though by no means universal. Perception of color in the urban environment is often confounded by the fact that colors can rarely be understood outside of their immediate context. Thus a yellow road would be seen in the context of its shoulders, the buildings that frame the road, the sky, the cars that drive along the road, and so forth, as well as our wider cultural and geographic prejudices.5 Alex Byrne and David Hilbert discuss the issue of light and color constancy in a city and assert that light and color are inseparable. Light affects how we see cities and landscapes in complex ways. This is not something we can easily change, but we can consider light in landscape architecture and urban design. An additional complexity: color and objects are mutually defining and cannot really be understood in isolation. Thus a yellow road would take part of its

146

chapter eight

meaning from the materiality of asphalt, as it would from the hue of yellow. I learned this lesson from my year of fieldwork in the Gulf. It took me many months to realize that the color cannot be abstracted from the object that is colored. Colors and objects are indeed mutually defining. A green bottle takes as much meaning from being a bottle as it does from being green. In this sense, I realized, I am sympathetic to philosophers who argue that color is a physical property of objects, albeit also context dependent.6 The use of color in spatial design and representation is rarely discussed in schools of the built environment. Color clearly has an agency in creating and shaping urban space.7 Color is determined by the distance from which it is viewed.8 Indeed, objects can seem closer or farther away depending on their color. Color affects mood. Color affects surface temperature and even the temperature within buildings. It seems incredible, therefore, that the literature on color and the environment is so thin. Why is it that green predominates the relationship to issues of sustainability? As Rania, involved in an environmental group in Dubai, told me, “It always seems strange that green is so closely associated with the environment in Dubai, since blue would seem more relevant given its life-sustaining properties.” Yet one could also make the case for beige or brown as a more suitable color for environmentalism, since much of the indigenous landscape in the Gulf involves shades of beige and brown.

th er e is m or e t o g r e en t h a n t h e v i s ua l Green is obviously more than a reflection of light of a certain type. Green is more than a color or a disposition; it is vegetation, open space, a type of building or urbanism, an environmental cause, a political movement, “the new black.” The color of photosynthesis and chlorophyll, green is mostly regarded as life giving, bountiful, and healthy (except when referring to the tone of human skin). Talk-show hosts relax in “green rooms,” and doctors’ scrubs are often green (to contrast with red). As an adjective, green can mean naiveté or something not yet fully ripe, such as green cheese, green olives, and vinho verde. Green is gaining new meanings in the English language; the environmental, social, aesthetic, and political ecologies of green are more apparent

the whiteness of green

147

across the globe and are beginning to be felt in the Gulf in a limited and particular way. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the equation of green with environmentalism to West Germany in the early 1970s and to movements originating in campaigns against nuclear power stations, such as the Grüne Aktion Zukunft (Green Campaign for the Future) and the grüne Listen (green lists) of election candidates.9 The Gulf ’s understanding of environmentalism has taken a different path: green and environmental concerns have a reasonably long association, but the kind of green—what color of green—that is considered most desirable, sustainable, and evocative has been shifting over time. LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) has emerged as one metric of green; the Amwaj Gateway project was the first LEED-registered project in Bahrain despite its being built on an artificial island: it may be LEED-compliant as a specific building, but the moment one scales up beyond the building’s four walls, that compliance evaporates. However, how to include more qualitative data in the metrics we use to measure and evaluate “greenness”?

a rainbow, not a binary Donald K. Swearer, a professor of divinity, calls for a broader view of color when, in writing about religion and its relationship to ecological urbanism, he says, “Religion conceives of human flourishing in broad, interconnected terms that includes the spirit as well as the body, spaces as well as forms, and not only green but all the colors of the rainbow—a symbol of hope, expectation, aspiration, and promise.”10 The obsession with green in cities could be better managed if the binary of desert versus green could be broken. Instead, the more relational idea embedded in the ancient phrase “water, greenery, and a beautiful face” might be a more productive way of imagining cities. It should not just be green versus desert or green versus the concrete of the city. The paradoxes of urban greenery are environmental, political, aesthetic, and technological insofar as they are interrelated. Solutions are required to work with green, in both senses of the word, rather than against it. Particular places require their own solutions; there cannot be a universal solution to the ideas of a more ecological city. The Iranian city of Isfahan is a fascinating

148

chapter eight

model for its combination of green spaces, green technologies (albeit ancient techniques) integrated within the public realm. The Naqsh-eJahan Square is one of the finest public spaces in the world, notable for its porosity and flexibility as a public space.

g r een a n d c i t i e s Bahrain is small and dense compared to other cities and city-states around the world. Preliminary calculations indicate a rate of four square meters of green area per person in Bahrain. This compares very favorably with Cairo, which had a rate of approximately 0.33 square meters of green space per person in 2005.11 Cairo is considered one of the cities with the smallest percentage of green space in the world. Dubai had the ambition to have twenty-three square meters of green per person by 2012, but would appear to have fallen short of that target. Nevertheless, the director of the Public Parks and Horticulture Department at Dubai Municipality declares, “We are now concentrating on the concept of ‘Greenification,’ and this can be clearly seen all around us.”12 As one Bahraini planner said to me, “Why is it that Bahrain thinks it can be so different in getting by on less green space than Dubai?” What is happening in Dubai could be replicated in Bahrain; presumably the planner would replicate Dubai’s strategies for achieving that green space, down to the expensive green lawns. In contrast, Curitiba in Brazil has an astounding fifty-four square meters of greenery per person but a temperate climate.13 For green to have the power it does requires contrasting colors. The transformative power of turning desert—or an arid cityscape—to luscious green is so potent that dreams seem to become reality, to achieve the impossible, to show that paradise can be constructed on earth. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch draws to our attention that to be effective a transformation needs to be of a certain magnitude; for instance, turning desert into gravel or concrete is not as potent a transformation as turning the desert into green.14 But the presence of the desert cannot be forgotten: even in its absence, it is very much present. As Bahrain’s population increases, the lack of available land will inevitably lead to ever-denser developments and associated changing of life-

the whiteness of green

149

styles, but existing and future green spaces need not be lost. Indeed, those that already exist could be maintained, but not without reorganizing their social and practical uses. Green is very much in the foreground of Bahrain, affecting not just how the country looks, a key part of its economic and cultural heritage (to say nothing of tourist appeal), but also how it works and plans for the future. In trying to understand green, we might go some way in protecting it. Green’s significance in Bahraini culture deserves overt recognition that Bahrain can keep its unique place in the world. Green has a long historical resonance in Bahrain, and the more specific that green is, the more likely it is to be sustainable within the local ecology.

g r een a s r e me d y It is a common trope among design and planning professionals in the Gulf that cities in the region have reached a stage in their infrastructural development such that the next ten to fifteen years will determine the urban form—and I would suggest, hues of green—that the Gulf (i.e., the Green Sea region) will live with for the next two hundred years or more. “A lot of money has been made from building in the Gulf, but even more is to be made from correcting the mistakes,” one expatriate professional declared, as he described his new business venture. The new company would focus not on new projects but on correcting the problems of contemporary construction, such as the reconfiguration of roads laid out in the wrong place, the remediation of reclamation projects, and—one might hope—the thoughtful integration of greenery into new developments as well as the conservation of date palm groves.

g r een a n d t h e en v i r on m en t In the Gulf, people over and over again would tell me that to be green is to be good to the environment. Green represents a huge transformation of the perceived harshness of the desert. Concepts of green and the environment in the Gulf extend back to a time before modernization,

150

chapter eight

when green was sustained by available water and the green consisted of mostly locally adapted, ecologically integrated fruits and vegetables. When the greenery began to be irrigated beyond the available resources, and the popular hues of green changed from date palm green to grass green, so too did green’s relationship with the environment. Previously, green correlated closely with sustenance and the prestige of leisure; today sustenance is a minor concern compared to power and symbolism. Bahrainis still speak of green in the old way, while doggedly pursuing the new green. We should be careful of green. Greenwashing does not help anyone. Green intentions are all very good, but a lot of follow-through and care is required to get to a green result in both senses of the word: color and sustainability. Even the best of intentions can go in all sorts of ungreen directions if someone’s asleep at the wheel. For instance, much of the paper and plastic packaging on green products is contaminated through the dyeing process.15 This surely is a metaphor for the highly irrigated and highly chemicalized green spaces in our cities, the worst of which are “sterile, monocultural, soaked in poison,” as the political ecologist Paul Robbins puts it.16 Despite, or perhaps because of, its economic, political, social, and cultural importance, green becomes a huge drain on natural resources, with cities like Manama using over half their water resources on the irrigation of greenery. The paradox of green environmentalism is not restricted to arid beige environments such as Bahrain and Dubai. Indeed, Rem Koolhaas, who is not especially known for his environmental credentials, remarked, “Embarrassingly, we have been equating responsibility with literal greening.”17 William McDonough and Michael Braungart have chronicled another form of green desert, the American lawn: “The average lawn is an interesting beast: people plant it, then douse it with artificial fertilizers and dangerous pesticides to make it grow and to keep it uniform—all so that they can hack and mow what they encouraged to grow. And woe to the small flower that rears its head!”18 Americans allegedly spend more money on watering lawns every year than they do on their federal tax returns. In an essay on public space in Cairo, Vincent Battesti says that green spaces “promote public frenzy.”19 He argues that the limited green space in Cairo has become a magnet for citizens during holidays and

the whiteness of green

151

weekends. The draw of green is almost universal, although the shape of that attraction may be particular and culturally bound.

eco lo gies o f g r ee n Bahrain can learn from the palm groves, where the date palms share the land with rotational crops, fruits, and vegetables, as well as grazing animals and fowl, and where water is rationed according to detailed customary laws. Perhaps the future lies in layering spaces with multiple uses, in recognizing the various related roles and meanings of green, in planning and designing for greenery in the city-state that is Bahrain. This book has argued for a thicker approach to green: an approach that is not just more environmental or greener, but whiter, in the sense that white is the coming together of all colors. To this end, the painter Josef Albers and the philosopher Félix Guattari find a theoretical commonality. Albers’s color juxtapositions reinforce the idea of the relationality of color. If you place red beside green, the red will appear different than if placed beside yellow.20 Writing some thirty years ago, the French philosopher and social scientist Félix Guattari called for three ecological registers of the environmental, the social, and “the mental,” or human subjectivity.21 Guattari, stressing that a technical approach to the environment is not enough, argues for a broader sense of ecology when considering questions of the sustainable city: “Only an ethico-political articulation—which I call ecosophy—between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify these questions.”22 For Guattari, “ecology” must include social and aesthetic dimensions, as well as environmental. It is a mistake to assume that all greens are one and the same. Green exists not just in itself or in relationship to other colors and hues; the various hues of green exist in relationship to the world around them too. Concepts of green depend not just on the hue of green or context, but also on temporality. We cannot understand or appreciate green—as a color or an environmental property—without understanding its various hues and its spatial and temporal context. Ethnography offers a way of better understanding these.

152

chapter eight

th e de ath of t h e g r ov es On a later visit to Bahrain, which I arranged to check some of the facts for this book, I sat down with one of the chief architects of the treated sewage effluent project. He told me that with the benefit of hindsight, he was devastated to realize that the availability of TSE was the single biggest contributor to the destruction of the remaining greenbelt and Bahraini date palm groves. “How could that be?” I inquired, shocked not just at his directness, but at the suggestion that the groves could be officially considered “dead.” The engineer explained that the authorities who implemented the scheme assumed that the availability of TSE would provide a steady irrigation source to replace the water that formerly ran through the water channels, the afla-j and qanawa-t, which were governed by the customary irrigation laws. When the freshwater springs—the second sea that gives Bahrain its name—dried up, these channels no longer carried water. In providing the TSE, they imagined they would save the remaining date palm groves and perhaps even encourage new groves and a thriving agriculture. As a consequence of this mistaken assumption, the date palms were dying en masse and the country losing a distinctive national asset and color. So surmised this engineer. When farmers were presented with the option of using TSE, few farmers used the supply, or even accepted it running through their land to another property. The farmers’ behavior was not only a rejection of TSE, which some considered unclean and h. ara-m, but an active argument with the government’s definition of the land. If they accepted the new irrigation source, farmers saw themselves left out of the future economy: with guaranteed irrigation, their land would forever be considered agricultural and thus only suitable for limited development. If, however, the land were left arid and fallow, even if it condemned the palms to death, the land would be freed of its agricultural classification, where only 30 percent was allowed for development, and instead would be developable in its entirety. A few groves, including Abbas’s family farm and the estate of Sheikh Mohammed, survive, as does the memory of the greenbelt, but overall the groves have lost their critical mass. And so it was that Bahrain’s remaining date palm groves, continuous over centuries, were deemed to have been lost in a few short years.

the whiteness of green

153

The solution to keep the groves alive, the TSE, was a purely technical one, perhaps even a green one, but it did not account for human practice. Had the engineers spent time in the groves, learning the codes and patterns of behavior of the farmers and of the trees themselves, they might have become aware of the history, dreams, and ambitions within those groves. They might have realized that it is difficult to resolve an ecological problem with a solely technical approach. Green cannot function long term as an engineering solution without accounting for its economic, environmental, political, and other symbolic meanings. Had the engineers taken a “greener” approach, the date palms might not have been lost. *

*

*

Shortly after arriving in Bahrain for fieldwork, I noticed that every time Isa answered his mobile phone, he would say, “Shlawnak?,” raising the pitch slightly toward the end as if posing a question. I thought Shlawnak was a friend of Isa’s who kept calling him. However, when I asked Isa who Shlawnak was, he explained that it is a colloquial greeting that I did not learn in my Modern Standard Arabic classes. Literally it means “What’s your color?” “Shlawnak?” is a popular greeting in the Gulf; used as pervasively as “How are you?” or “How’s it going?” the question implies that color is a measure of a person’s well-being. It is telling that “Shlawnak?” invariably brings the reply “Al-h. amdu l-illa–h,” “Praise be to God,” rather than the color the question literally asks for. What color is praise to God? What color is faith? All colors, perhaps, including those greens that are increasingly hard to find in Bahrain. Shlawnak? I am hoping that future greens will be more aware of the multiple meanings and paradoxes of green.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

introduction Epigraph: E. L. Durand, “Notes on the Islands of Bahrain and Antiquities,” in Political Resident Bushehr to Secretary to the Government of India, 1 May 1879, R/15/2/192 IOR, cited in Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29. 1. In the same way as literature is a refined form of writing, see my essay “Is Landscape Literature?” in Is Landscape . . . ? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, ed. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2016). 2. Richard T. T. Forman, Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995), 3. 3. R. P. Willis, Geology of the Arabian Peninsula, Bahrain—Geological Survey Professional Paper 560–E (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967), E1. 4. Roger Sanjek, “A Vocabulary for Fieldnotes,” in Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 93. 5. Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations supports my intuition that color and an object are necessarily inherently intertwined. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 20e. 6. Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, Readings on Color: The Philosophy of Color, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), xi. 155

156

notes

7. Ibid. 8. Charles Waldheim, The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 11. 9. Doherty and Waldheim, eds., Is Landscape . . . ?, i. 10. The Persian Gulf has been referred to under many names depending on time, language, and political affiliations: Sinvs Persicvs, Golfo de Persia, Mare El Catif, Olim, Mar Del Catif, Gulfo de Bossora, Mer de Perse—just to highlight a few. Many fifteenth-century maps have full sentences written in this body of water to highlight the pearl trade in Bahrain. See H. H. Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohamed Al Qasimi, The Gulf in Historic Maps 1478–1861 (Leicester: Streamline Press, 1999). More recently the gulf has been known as the Arabian Gulf, although this term is mostly used by the Arab states surrounding the gulf. The Persian Gulf is the term most commonly used internationally, including by the United Nations. 11. Dionisius Agius discusses how the Indian Ocean was historically referred to as the Green Sea. Dionisius A. Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008), 8–9. Agius tells us it was split into seven regions with the Fars region being the corridor from Southern Mesopotamia to Oman, presumably what is now mostly referred to as the Persian or Arabian Gulf. 12. Research into primary and secondary historical sources shows early cartographers using the term Green Sea to reference the Atlantic Ocean, sections of the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. Arab historians such as al-Masʿudi (see below) used the term Green Sea to reference the Atlantic Ocean or “Sea of Darkness.” See Michael J. Ferrar, “Al-Idrisi; The Book of Roger: The Description of L’Angleterre,” Cartography Unchained website, last modified April 2016, accessed April 16, 2016, http://w w w.cartography unchained.com/pdfs /cgid1_pdf. 13. Al Qasimi, The Gulf in Historic Maps 1478–1861, 68. My great thanks to Suryani Oka Dewa Ayu and the staff of the Pusey Map Library and Houghton Library at Harvard University for their huge patience and persistence in locating this map. 14. Alexis Wick, The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 18. 15. My thanks to Dr. Maher Abouseif, who first introduced me to the phrase, and to Dr. Sawsan Karimi, who elaborated further on its meaning. 16. Samer al-Gilani and staff at the Bayt al-Qur’an in Manama facilitated the library search. 17. Genesis 2:10–14. 18. Dora Jane Hamblin, “Has the Garden of Eden Been Located at Last?,” Smithsonian 18, no. 2 (1987): 127–35. The article describes the work of the archaeologist Juris Zarins, who used Landsat images to locate a “fossil” river

notes

157

running diagonally through Arabia to Kuwait, which he argued is the Pishon River mentioned in Genesis. 19. For more on this, see the Epic of Gilgamesh. For example: Benjamin R. Foster, ed., The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation, Analogues, Criticism (New York: Norton, 2001). 20. Samuel Noah Kramer, “The Indus Civilization and Dilmun, the Sumerian Paradise Land,” Expedition Magazine 6, no. 3 (May 1964): n.p., available at www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/?p=740. 21. Eric Burrows, SJ, “Tilmun, Bahrain, Paradise,” Orientaalia. Commentarii de rebus Assyro–Babylonicis, Arabicis, Aegyptiacis, etc., Editi a Pontificio Instituto Biblico, March 30, 1928, 3–24. Cited in Haya Ali Al Khalifa and Michael Rice, eds., Bahrain through the Ages: The History (London; New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 183. 22. The eastern coast of Arabia was formerly considered Bahrain, as was Qatar. 23. Lawrence of Arabia, dir. David Lean (Columbia Pictures, 1962), DVD. 24. M. D. Cornes and C. D. Cornes, The Wild Flowering Plants of Bahrain: An Illustrated Guide (London: Immel Publishing, 1989), 15. 25. The universal here is used in the sense of Spivak’s assertion that the universal becomes an obligation. See Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 26. Aileen Keating, Mirage: Power, Politics, and the Hidden History of Arabian Oil. (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), 484–85. 27. Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, 24. 28. Justin Gengler, “Bahrain’s Sunni Awakening,” Middle East Research and information Project, accessed February 26, 2016, www.merip.org/mero /mero011712. 29. Ahmed al-Dailami, “ ‘Purity and Confusion’: The Hawala between Persians and Arabs in the Contemporary Gulf,” The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 299–326. 30. The values are: Bahrain 511 litres/day, Kuwait 503 l/d, Oman 203 1/d, Qatar 744 l/d, Saudi Arabia 300 l/d and the United Arab Emirates 631 l/d (World Bank 2005), cited in The Green Economy in the Gulf, ed. Mohamed Abdel Raouf and Mari Luomi (New York: Routledge, 2016). 31. Central Intelligence Agency, “Bahrain,” World Factbook, last modified February 25, 2016, accessed February 26, 2016, www.cia.gov/library/publications /resources/the-world-factbook/geos/ba.html. 32. “Bahrain Oil Reserves Set at 632.5 Million Barrels,” accessed August 10, 2016, www.tradearabia.com/news/OGN_281081.html. 33. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) website, accessed July 1, 2006, http://www.fao.org/fi/fcp/en/bhr/profile.htm.

158

notes

34. “The International Islamic Finance Forum: 22–24 July 2002 Geneva, Switzerland. Bahrain and Dubai vie for Middle East Finance Crown,” Press Release Network, accessed August 10, 2016, www.pressreleasenetwork.com /pr-2002/june/mainpr1306.htm. Also see William Wallis, “Saudis to Construct $6.7bn Financial District in Riyadh,” Financial Times, May 10, 2006, 23: “Longer term, the Saudi authorities hope Riyadh will emerge as the Middle East’s financial capital—a goal shared by Dubai, Qatar and Bahrain.” 35. “Towards Environmental Sustainability,” in State of the Environment 2005 Report Singapore, accessed February 26, 2016, https://www.mewr.gov.sg /docs/default-source/default-document-library/grab-our-research/soe-report2005(minister-39-s-messageintroduction).pdf. 36. Steven Wright, “Fixing the Kingdom: Political Evolution and Socio-Economic Challenges in Bahrain,” in Occasional Papers (Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University, Qatar, 2010). 37. The GCC includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Established in 1981, the GCC aspires toward closer economic and political collaboration among the member states with the idea of a more unified “Gulf Union” often floated. 38. Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), 14.

chapter 1 Epigraph: Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 28–29. 1. For more on intimacy, see Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997). 2. Steven C. Caton, Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 3. Accessed February 26, 2016, http://ogleearth.com/BahrainandGoogle Earth.pdf. 4. Stefan Geens, “Bahrain in Google Earth, Unplugged,” Ogle Earth website, last modified September 21, 2006, accessed February 26, 2016, http://www .ogleearth.com/2006/09/bahrain_in_goog.html. 5. See, for example, Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980); Michael Herzfeld, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 6. Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

notes

159

7. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Method and Scope of Anthropological Fieldwork,” in Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, 2nd ed. Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Jeffrey A. Sluka (Oxford: Wiley, 2012), 70. 8. See my review essay: “Review of Cairo Cosmopolitan by Diane Singerman and Paul Amar,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 4 (2010): 725–26. In it I describe the edited collection as a sort of multiauthored ethnography. 9. The research for the book included several trips around the Gulf to Kuwait, Iran, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, as well as Egypt. It is also based on several private visits to Bahrain extending back to my first visit in 2004. It was during the year of fieldwork that I decided to narrow my focus to Bahrain rather than studying the Gulf, as had been my original plan. 10. Farha Ghannam, Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 11. See Doherty, “Review of Cairo Cosmopolitan.” 12. Caton, Yemen Chronicle, 66. 13. Ibid., 14–15, 133. 14. I mean traditional in the sense that one spends an extended period of time living among so-called indigenous people. 15. Of course, there is a whole area of focus on the anthropology of the nation and nationality. See, for instance, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); and Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997). 16. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 22. 17. See, for example, Arjun Appuradurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Laura Rival, ed., The Social Life of Trees (New York: Berg, 1998); Caton, Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2010). These are all important texts as they emphasize the anthropological study of things. 18. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 5. 19. For more on the meaning of landscape, see Doherty and Waldheim, eds., Is Landscape . . . ?; and John R. Stilgoe, What Is Landscape? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 20. See, for example, Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 21. T. S. Eliot, “Andrew Marvell,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 31, 1921. 22. See, for example, Richard Long, Walking the Line (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002).

160

notes

23. See Charles Waldheim, “Aerial Representation and the Recovery of Landscape,” in Recovering Landscape, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). 24. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002), back cover. 25. See Geoffrey Alan Jellicoe and Susan Jellicoe, The Landscape of Man: Shaping the Environment from Prehistory to the Present Day (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 340 and 343. In one of a series of unpublished interviews with the author in 1994–95, Geoffrey Jellicoe suggested that McHarg’s maps could be considered art, “if done well.” 26. Ibid. 27. See Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960); Stan Allen, Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). 28. Forman, Land Mosaics, 3–7. 29. One significant difference between Forman’s and Lynch’s approaches is that Lynch also includes the visual component (landmarks), perhaps because landmarks are not considered important for, or appreciated by, wildlife. 30. McHarg also extensively engaged with anthropologists, seemingly preferring anthropologists to sociologists. 31. Waldheim, “Aerial Representation and the Recovery of Landscape,” 136. 32. Ibid., 11. 33. See Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures. 34. Forman, Land Mosaics, 3. 35. Ibid., 3–7. 36. Hugh Raffles, In Amazonia: A Natural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 7. 37. Benjamin, One-Way Street, 28–29. 38. John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker, 1998), 1. 39. For more on this, see: Richard T. T. Forman’s diagram outlining the scalar distinction between an ecosystem, landscape, region, continent, and planet, in Land Mosaics, 12. 40. For more on this, see “Design Anthropology: Intertwining Different Timelines, Scales and Movements,” a panel convened by Wendy Gunn, Rachel Charlotte Smith, and Ton Otto at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) meeting, EASA2010: Crisis and Imagination, Maynooth, August 2010, accessed February 26, 2016, http://www.nomadit.co.uk/easa/easa2010 /panels.php5?PanelID=626. 41. John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi, “The Fieldwork Encounter, Experience, and the Making of Truth: An Introduction,” in Being There: The

notes

161

Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth, ed. John Borneman and Abdellah Hammoudi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 2. 42. Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009), 15. Yaneva goes on to argue for an admirable infra-reflexive approach to writing about design—where the text is no special thing—and which follows directly from ethnography: “The metareflexive way of writing is based on the idea that the most deleterious effect of a text is to be naively believed by the reader as relating to a referent out there in some way; it is far from being productive. I prefer to follow an infra-reflexive approach that goes against this common belief by asking no privilege for the account at hand.” 43. Dori Tunstall, “What Is Design Anthropology to Me?,” accessed July 31, 2016, http://designanthropology.tumblr.com/post/12019865650/what-isdesign-anthropology-to-me-dori-tunstall. 44. Yaneva, Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, 99–104.

chapter 2 Epigraph: From the diary of Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, cited in Robert Belgrave, “C. Dalrymple Belgrave: The Early Years as Adviser in Bahrain,” in Bahrain through the Ages: The History, ed. Al-Khalifa, Abdullah bin Khalid, and Michael Rice (New York: Kegan Paul, 1993), 110. Charles Belgrave was the British-born adviser to the ruler of Bahrain from 1926 to 1957. 1. Note the distinction in values between golden and yellow. 2. Fuad Khuri, An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World, ed. Sonia Jalbout Khuri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 106. 3. John R. Stilgoe, personal communication, 2007. 4. “Humidity” in Average Weather For Manama, Bahrain, WeatherSpark Beta, accessed February 26, 2016, https://weatherspark.com/averages/32754 /Manama-Muhafazat-al-Muharaq-Bahrain. In 1954, James H. D. Belgrave estimated Bahrain’s mean daytime humidity at 74 percent. See, for example, James Hamad Dacre Belgrave, Welcome to Bahrain (Stourbridge, Worchestershire: Mark & Moody, 1954), 27; “Humidity,” in Average Weather For Dubai, United Arab Emirates, WeatherSpark Beta, accessed February 26, 2016, https:// weatherspark.com/averages/32855/Dubai-United-Arab-Emirates. 5. See, for example, Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), where color is always seen in relation to the colors that surround it. 6. Götz Hoeppe, Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life, trans. John Stewart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 110–12. 7. Ibid.

162

notes

8. Hashim Sarkis, “One Thousand Courtyards: Observations on the Courtyard as a Recurring Design Element,” in The Courtyard: From Cultural Reference to Universal Relevance, ed. Nasser O. Rabbat (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 200. 9. Tarek Waly, Private Skies: The Courtyard Pattern in the Architecture of the House (Bahrain: Al Handasah Center, 1992), 14. 10. William Gass, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York: New York Review of Books, 2014 [1974]), 75–76. 11. Ibid., 81. 12. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michael Sadlier (New York: Dover, 1977), 61. 13. From the diary of Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, cited in Robert Belgrave, “Belgrave of Bahrain,” 110. 14. Qassim Haddad, “The Sea Has Its Transformations . . . Make Way,” trans. Lena Jayyusi and Christopber Middleton, Qassim Haddad website, accessed February 25, 2016, http://www.qhaddad.com/english/poems-8.asp. 15. James Belgrave, Welcome to Bahrain. 16. For more on how water gets its color, see Franz Boas, “Beiträge zur Erkentniss der Farbe des Wassers / Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water,” PhD diss., University of Kiel, 1881. 17. Ibid., 7. Translation by Hannes Zander. 18. Steven Caton, personal communication, 2015. 19. See, for example, Sonia Seherr-Thoss, Design and Color in Islamic Architecture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968); Michael Barry, Color and Symbolism in Islamic Architecture: Eight Centuries of the Tile-maker’s Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Arash Kazeni, Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 20. Kazeni, Sky Blue Stone, 55. 21. Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 322. 22. Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 64. 23. My interlocutors often blamed the demise in the Bahraini pearling industry on the lower prices in pearls brought on by the industrial innovation of pearl farming coming from Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. 24. See, for example, J. C. Wilkinson, Water and Tribal Settlement in South East Arabia: A Study of the Aflaj in Oman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). 25. Andrew Wheatcroft, Bahrain in Original Photographs 1880–1961 (London: Kegan Paul, 1998), 110. 26. Ibid., 115. 27. R. B. Sergeant, “Customary Irrigation Law among the Baharnah of Bahrain,” in Bahrain through the Ages, the History, ed. Shaikh Abdullah bin Khalid Al-Khalifa and Michael Rice (London: Kegan Paul, 1993), 471–497.

notes

163

28. F. R. S. Henson, “Observations on the Geology and Petroleum Occurrences of the Middle East,” Proceedings of the 3rd World Petroleum Congress, Section 1 (The Hague, 1951), 118–40. 29. For example, Bridging the Gap between Water Science and Policy Making: A Report on the First Conference on Water Policy and Associated Technological Challenges in Arid Dynamic Environments: The Special Case of Arabian Gulf Countries (2009), accessed July 31, 2017, www.files.ethz.ch/isn/110891/Bridging_ the_Gap_7031.pdf. 30. See, for example, Marad J. Bino, Nasser L. Faruqui, and Asit K. Biswas, eds., Water Management in Islam (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2001); Asit K. Biswas, Egal Rached, and Cecilia Tortajada, Water as a Human Right for the Middle East and North Africa (Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2008). 31. Ogle Earth, accessed February 26, 2016, http://ogleearth.com/Bahrainand GoogleEarth.pdf. 32. Unpublished government documents seen by the author. 33. Rebecca Torr, “Give Beaches to the Public,” Gulf Daily News, August 22, 2008. 34. A. Williams, “Why We Need More Open Spaces,” Gulf Daily News, August 28, 2008. 35. JWT Work in Progress. Blue Is the New Green: A JWT Trendletter (New York: JWT Intelligence, 2008), 8. 36. “Color Families,” accessed August 6, 2016, www.dutchboy.com/coloradvice/color-tips/color-families/. 37. Both quoted in Lucio Guerrero, “America’s Favorite Color Reflects a Love of True Blue,” Chicago Sun-Times, January 12, 2004, accessed April 12, 2016, www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2–1520724.html. Pantone is the self-described “authority on color, provider of color systems and leading technology for accurate communication of color.” Pantone website, www.pantone.com. 38. E-mail to author, December 20, 2009. 39. Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 18. 40. Albers, Interaction of Color, 1.

chapter 3 1. There are some parallels with green-red colorblindness, the most common type of colorblindness (6 percent of males cannot distinguish between red and green). Green-red colorblindness was identified by the scientist John Dalton whose name now describes this phenomenon. This results in people seeing a sort of muddy brown.

164

notes

2. Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red, trans. Erdag ˘ M. Göknar (New York: Vintage, 2002), 186. 3. Ibid., 188. 4. Mainstream Shiʿa are also called the Twelver or Imami Shiʿa. Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, is regarded by Sunnis as the fourth caliph and by Shiʿa as the first of twelve imams to follow the Prophet. The Twelfth Imam is believed to be still alive and in hiding. 5. Sawsan Ghuloom Karimi, “Dress and Identity: Culture and Modernity in Bahrain,” PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2003, 252. 6. Al-Kita–b al-akhd. ar (The Green Book), published in three volumes in the 1970s, was required reading in Libya during Qaddafi’s rule. The book outlines Qaddafi’s political philosophy on areas of democracy, economics, and his “Third International Theory.” “The Green Book,” says Qadaffi, “prescribes the way of salvation to the masses of wage workers and domestic servants in order to achieve the freedom of man.” The Green Book / Al-Kita–b al-akhd. ar (London: Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe, 1976), 30. 7. Personal correspondence between the author and Thomas Fibiger. 8. Karimi, “Dress and Identity,” 252. 9. Ibid., 251. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Husayn is regarded by the Shiʿa as being the rightful heir of the Prophet Muhammad. 13. Bahrain’s relations with Iran were especially strained after the 1979 Islamic revolution, when Iran was accused of attempting to incite revolution in other Shiʿi dominant states. 14. “Quiz,” Civil Rights in the Middle East Report 71, Hands Across the Mideast Support Alliance, accessed February 26, 2016, w w w.hamsaweb.org /crime/71.html. Nowruz is the Persian New Year and falls on the spring equinox. Although it is a secular holiday and has roots in Zoroastrianism, Muslim Iranians also celebrate it. 15. There is a permanent display of a traditional Bahraini wedding dress at the National Museum of Bahrain. 16. Karimi, “Dress and Identity,” 252. Karimi describes their significance: “Green, perceived as a symbolic colour of Islam, red of martyrdom and resistance, black of misfortune, death commemoration and remembrance, gold of continuous prosperity and so on.” 17. Ibid., 256. 18. For more on ʿAshura,ʾ see Thomas Fibiger, “ʿAshuraʾ in Bahrain: Analyses of an Analytical Event,” Social Analysis 54, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 29–46.

notes

165

19. James Hamad Dacre Belgrave, Welcome to Bahrain (Stourbridge, Worchestershire: Mark & Moody, 1954), 82. 20. See, for example, Fibiger, “ʿAshuraʾ in Bahrain.” 21. See, for example, Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future (New York: Norton, 2006). Also see Lara Deeb, An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿi Lebanon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Saba Mahmoud, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 22. Steven C. Caton, Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 23. Disease transmission was one argument against cutting the head in Khameni’s 1993 fatwa. See Fibiger, “ʿAshuraʾ in Bahrain.” 24. Apparently, in the American Civil War, the abiding memory for the veterans was the stench of blood. See, for example, Drew G. Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). 25. Professor Raymond later told me this is an ethnographic strategy, as it allows informants to contact the ethnographer without feeling that the ethnographer wants something from them. 26. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 453.

chapter 4 1. See Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, who argue that the urban should no longer be tied to any one type of settlement and that density of development is an outmoded measure for urbanization. Instead, they suggest that the urban is “an increasingly worldwide condition,” which they term “planetary urbanization.” Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “Planetary Ubanization,” in Urban Constellations, ed. Matthew Gandy (Berlin: Jovis, 2011), 10–13. 2. This narrative was also disputed by many! 3. See Thomas Fibiger, “Heritage Erasure and Heritage Transformation: How Heritage Is Created by Destruction in Bahrain,” International Journal of Heritage Studies, June 24, 2014, doi: 10.1080/13527258.2014.930064; Steffen Laursen, “Rapid Urbanization and Cultural Heritage Management in Bahrain: Reconstructing the Original Distribution of Bronze Age Burial Mounds from a 1959 Aerial Photograph Archive,” in Landscapes through the Lens: Aerial Photographs and Historic Environment, ed. David C. Cowley, Robin A. Standring, and Matthew J. Abicht (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 207–14.

166

notes

4. John Gordon Lorimar, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1908), 212–53. 5. Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 18. 6. Gareth Doherty, “There’s More to Green than Meets the Eye: Green Urbanism in Bahrain,” in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016), 178–87. 7. Fuad I. Khuri, Tribe and State Bahrain: The Transformation of Social and Political Authority in an Arab State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1980), 39. 8. The pollen husk contains the male flowers and pollen, called al-guru-f. 9. As reported in Sahih Bukhari, Hadith 5327 and Sahih Muslim, Hadith 3814. 10. Roy Ellen, “Palms and the Prototypicality of Trees,” in The Social Life of Trees, ed. Laura Rival (Oxford: Berg, 1998), 59–60. 11. Ibid., 75. 12. E. J. H. Corner, The Natural History of Palms (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 7. 13. Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, “Saturday, November 3, 1956,” Diary of Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, Archives of the University of Exeter. 14. Bushehri Family Archive, Bahrain. 15. Fuad I. Khuri, An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World, ed. Sonia Jalbout Khuri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 112–14. 16. In line with other countries in the region, the Bahraini weekend was changed in September 2006 from Thursday–Friday to Friday–Saturday. Saudi Arabia was the last of the GCC countries to implement this change in 2013. 17. Belgrave, “Tuesday, January 11, 1955,” Diary of Charles Dalrymple Belgrave. 18. E. L. Durand, Reports to British Political Resident in Bushire, cited in Curtis E. Larsen, Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 22. 19. Mustapha Ben Hamouche, “Land-Use Change and its Impact on Urban Planning in Bahrain: A GIS Approach,” presented at the Middle East Spatial Technology Conference, Bahrain, December 2007, accessed June 26, 2008, http://www .gisdevelopment.net/proceedings/mest/2007/RemoteSensingApplicationsLanduse .htm.

chapter 5 Epigraph: Report on Preparation of Greater Manama Master Plan, Physical Planning Unit, Government of Bahrain, December 3, 1972.

notes

167

1. Much of this story is documented in Mohammad Noor Al-Nabi, The History of Land Use and Development in Bahrain (Manama: Information Affairs Authority, 2012). 2. Memorandum Presented to Ministerial Council Regarding Future of Lands Located in Green Belt, State of Bahrain, Ministry of Housing, Municipalities and Environment, 1999. 3. Report on Preparation of Greater Manama Master Plan, Physical Planning Unit, Government of Bahrain, December 3, 1972, 1. 4. Cited in Report on Preparation of Greater Manama Master Plan, Physical Planning Unit, Government of Bahrain, December 3, 1971. (I have been told that this quotation originally appeared in the Gulf Mirror, date unknown, and this is what was cited in the plan). 5. Ben Kendim and Aubrey Herbert, written of Bahrain in 1905, cited in Sir Charles Belgrave’s autobiography, Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 16. 6. Richard T. T. Forman, Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions (Cambridge, U.K.: University of Cambridge Press, 1995), 3–7. 7. Marcus Hall, Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 4. Hall discusses the difference between pragmatics and aesthetics. For more on conservation versus preservation, see “Conservation vs Preservation and the National Park Service,” www.nps.gov/klgo/learn/education/classrooms/conservation-vspreservation.htm. In terms of the Bahraini date palm groves, it is really a productive versus aesthetic issue rather one about presence or absence of humans. Preservation offers a stand-alone object that can be lifted out of its place and reproduced anywhere. For more on this topic, see William Cronin, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1996). Also see the first chapter in James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), where he describes the rigorous regimentation and subsequent failure of German forest management compared with the success of the unmanaged forest. Many thanks to Susan Nigra Snyder and George E. Thomas for their insights on critical conservation, which they describe as a cultural ecology. 8. Fuad I. Khuri, Tribe and State Bahrain: The Transformation of Social and Political Authority in an Arab State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 101. 9. CABE Space, Does Money Grow on Trees? (2005), 11. This publication is available from the UK National Archives at http://webarchive.nationalarchives .gov.uk/20110118095356/http:/www.cabe.org.uk/publications/does-money-grow-ontrees.

168

notes

chapter 6 1. Ann Grodzins Gold and Bhoju Ram Gujar, In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 241–42. 2. Arjun Appadurai, “Comments on ‘The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine,’ ” Social Science and Medicine 27, no. 3 (1988): 206–7. 3. M. D. Cornes and C. D. Cornes, The Wild Flowering Plants of Bahrain: An Illustrated Guide (London: Immel Publishing, 1989), 99 and 127. 4. Kaff means “palm of the hand.” 5. Diana Charles Phillips, Wild Flowers of Bahrain: A Field Guide to Herbs, Shrubs, and Trees (Manama: Arabian Printing and Publishing House, 1988), 142–43. 6. Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 97. 7. James Bell, “He Said Forward to the Backward!,” Life magazine, November 17, 1952, 161. 8. Hameed Al Qaed, ed., Pearl, Dreams of Shell: Anthology of Contemporary Bahrain Poetry (Manama: Shaikh Ebrahim Center for Culture and Research, 2007). The anthology compiled and translated by Hameed Al Qaed is the best, if only, collection of contemporary Bahraini poetry in English. 9. Qur’an 6:99, al-Anʿam (The Cattle). 10. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, trans. Lena Jayyusi and Alistair Elliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 302–3. 11. Khalifa has a collection of poems, The Thirst of the Palm Tree, written in colloquial Bahraini Arabic and not yet translated into English. Many of Khalifa’s poems symbolize green and palms. 12. Alireza insisted the party took place in 1971, though. If it were 1971, and I suspect it was, rather than the coronation, he was likely referring to the lavish party of October 12–16, 1971, held at Persepolis in a specially constructed tent city, to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Iranian monarchy. 13. “Climate,” Meterological Directorate of the Ministry of Transport and Telecommunications, Kingdom of Bahrain, accessed February 26, 2016, www .bahrainweather.gov.bh/dust. 14. Richard T. T. Forman, Road Ecology: Science and Solutions (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003). 15. Fieldnotes, March 20, 2008. 16. Cornes and Cornes, The Wild Flowering Plants of Bahrain, 30; Diana Charles Phillips, Wild Flowers of Bahrain: A Field Guide to Herbs, Shrubs, and Trees (Manama: Arabian Printing, 1988), 41. 17. Phillips, Wild Flowers of Bahrain, 41.

notes

169

18. Thaer Zriqat, “Sharjah Residents Get First Glimpse inside New Rolla Square Park,” The National, December 3, 2014, www.thenational.ae/uae/tourism /sharjah-residents-get-first-glimpse-inside-new-rolla-square-park. 19. Benedict XVI, Angelus address, St Peter’s Square, Vatican City, December 6, 2009, accessed August 6, 2016, http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en /angelus/2009/documents/hf_ben-xvi_ang_20091206.html. 20. Flemming Højlund, Glob Og Paradisets Have: De Danske Ekspeditioner Til Den Arabiske Golf / Glob and the Garden of Eden: The Danish Expeditions to the Arabian Gulf (Højbjerg: Moesgård Museum, 1999), image 63. 21. Bell, “He Said Forward to the Backward!,” 157.

chapter 7 Epigraph: Mrs. Dunne, a homeowner at Riffa Views, speaking on Riffa Views TV. “Settling In,” Riffa Views BSC (C) TV, RVTV, October 16, 2009, accessed March 30, 2010, http://riffaviews.com/. 1. “Bahrain ‘Kept Green by King’s Initiative,’ ” press release, Bahrain International Garden Show website, March 5, 2015, accessed February 27, 2016, www .bigs.com.bh/press/press-releases/bahrain-kept-green-king-initiative.html. 2. The Pearl Monument was controversially demolished on March 18, 2011, as part of the response to the 2011 uprising. 3. Having said that, Belgrave’s first book on the Siwa oasis in Egypt—Siwa: The Oasis of Jupiter Ammon—is illustrated with several watercolors by Belgrave and is curious for the lack of greenery. None of the watercolors show greenery, even though the book is supposedly about the oasis. 4. Technically, therefore, they are not weeds, as a weed is an unwanted plant. 5. Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, Personal Column (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 16. 6. Ibid., 235. 7. Ibid., 177. 8. Mustapha Ben Hamouche, “Land-Use Change and Its Impact on Urban Planning in Bahrain: A GIS Approach,” presented at the Middle East Spatial Technology Conference, Bahrain, December 2007, accessed June 26, 2008, www.gisdevelopment.net/proceedings/mest/2007/RemoteSensingApplications Landuse.htm. 9. “Sheikh Zayed in Quotes,” UAE Interact website, February 11, 2015, accessed February 27, 2016, www.uaeinteract.com/docs/Sheikh_Zayed_in_ quotes/18411.htm. 10. John Elliot, “Master Planning with a Land Rover,” interview in Al Manakh: Dubai Guide, Gulf Survey, Global Agenda, ed. Ole Bouman, Mitra Khoubrou, and Rem Koolhaas (Netherlands: Stichting Archis, Moutamarat, AMO, 2007), 169.

170

notes

11. The master plan of 1952, which replaced the old Kuwait with the “modern” city replaced the courtyard house with the typology of the villa with a garden and greenery surrounding the house. 12. Advertisement by J. Walter Thompson (JWT) advertising company, Bahrain, first seen by the author in Bahrain in 2006. 13. E-mail to author, 2008. 14. “Riffa Views Signature Estates,” Riffa Views BSC (C), 2014, accessed February 27, 2016, http://riffaviews.com/. 15. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Dunne, homeowners at Riffa Views, speaking on Riffa Views TV, RVTV. “Settling In,” Riffa Views BSC (C) TV, RVTV, October 16, 2009, accessed March 30, 2010, http://riffaviews.com/. 16. “Enhancement of Life,” in Dilmunia for a Balanced Life (Manama: Ithmaar Development Company, 2010). 17. Batelco Bahrain Telecomunications Company website, last modified 2009, accessed February 27, 2016, www.181.com.bh/Home/Search. 18. E-mail to author, 2008. 19. John R. Stilgoe, Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places (New York: Walker, 1999), 7. 20. Angela Bulloch, “Angela Bullock in Conversation with Michael Archer,” in Prime Numbers: Angela Bulloch (Cologne: Walther König, 2005), 252. 21. Unpublished document, Ministry of Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs (2010). Copy in the possession of the author. 22. The others are: “1, Create One Plan; 2, Achieve a Market Economy Specialized in Global and Regional Markets; 3, Preserve and Strengthen Environmental Resources; 4, Establish an Interconnected, Intermodal Transportation Strategy; 5, Build Distinct Communities; 6, Define the Public Waterfront; 7, Protect the Country’s Cultural and Architectural Heritage; 8, Meet Future Military Needs; and 10, Promote a Sustainable Future.” Skidmore Owings and Merrill master plan for Bahrain. 23. Mohja Kahf, “Purple Ihram and the Feminine Beatitudes of Hajj,” in New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color, ed. Gareth Doherty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2011). 24. Ibid. 25. Qur’an 55:64, al-Rahman.

chapter 8 1. Kenya Hara, White (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2007), 8. 2. In fact, Berlin and Kay identified that all languages have a term for white and black, the next stage includes red, and the third stage of languages includes green or yellow. Only the fourth level has a word for blue. Brent Berlin and Paul

notes

171

Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 14–23. 3. Ibid., 17. 4. Charles A. Riley, “Color in Philosophy,” in Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995), 20–69. 5. Gareth Doherty, ed., New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design), 2011. See text for more on color and space. 6. Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, Readings on Color: The Philosophy of Color, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), xi–xxv. 7. Doherty, ed., New Geographies 3. 8. Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, “Urban Light and Color,” in New Geographies 3, ed. Doherty, 64–71. 9. “Green, adj. and n.1,” The Oxford English Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary defines green thus: “Of, relating to, or supporting environmentalism, esp. as a political issue; (also with capital initial) belonging to or supporting an environmentalist political party.” 10. Donald K. Swearer, “Religious Studies and Ecological Urbanism,” in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostavai and Gareth Doherty (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016), 543. 11. “Cairo, a city of 16 million, is one of the most densely populated in the world, with only one square foot (approx. 0.3 square meters) of green space per person prior to 2005.” “A Garden in Cairo,” PBS, available at www.pbs.org/e2 /episodes/301_a_garden_in_cairo_trailer.html. 12. Ibid. 13. “Cities of Virtue,” Newsweek, April 15, 2007, accessed February 29, 2016, www.newsweek.com/cities-virtue-97365. 14. Maurice Bloch, “Why Trees, Too, Are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life,” in The Social Life of Trees, ed. Laura Rival (New York: Berg, 1998). Bloch suggests that to be effective, the transformation must be of a certain magnitude and cites the example of the transformation of wine to blood in the Catholic Mass: the transformation would not be so intense if it were wine to, say, whisky. 15. Alice Rawsthorn, “The Toxic Side of Being, Literally, Green,” New York Times, April 4, 2010, accessed February 27, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05 /arts/05iht-design5.html. 16. Paul Robbins, Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 138. 17. Rem Koolhaas, “Advancement versus Apocalypse,” in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016), 69.

172

notes

18. William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 33. 19. Vincent Battesti, “The Giza Zoo: Reappropriating Public Spaces, Reimagining Urban Beauty,” in Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, ed. Diane Singerman and Paul Amar (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006), 490. 20. See Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 21. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 27–28. 22. Ibid.

Glossary

abaya a robe-like garment, usually black, worn by women in public adha–n Muslim call to prayer Ahl al-Bayt the Prophet Muhammad’s household ʿAjam Bahraini Shʿia of Persian descent ʿajwa type of date grown in the Medina region of Saudi Arabia al-barr the desert al-h. amdu l-illa–h “Praise be to God” al-rawla banyan (tree) al-sala–m ʿalaykum “Peace be upon you”; the standard reply is wa-ʿalaykum al-sala–m, “And upon you peace” ʿAshuraʾ the anniversary of Imam Husayn, tenth day of Muharram a–ya–t signs of nature ʿayn a spring ʿazada–rı– Muharram procession ba–gh garden (Persian) ba–ghcheh public park (Bahraini dialect), literally “small garden” (Persian) Baharna Bahraini Arab, invariably Shiʿa bah. r sea baraka blessing barra–da “cold store,” grocery store barasti huts made from date palm fronds busta–n garden / orchard / date palm plantation 173

174

glossary

chanʿad mackerel chawchab freshwater springs that punctuate the seabed; colloquial for kawkab, “planet” dinar Bahraini currency; one dinar equals one thousand fils Eid al-Fitr celebration of the breaking of the Ramadan fast falaj (pl. afla–j) water channel fatwa a legal opinion under Islamic law fils Bahraini currency, equivalent to one-thousandth of a dinar ghutra Gulf Arabic word for kaffiyeh, traditional headdress worn by men gidu Bahraini form of shı–sha (water pipe or hookah) hadith (pl. ah. a–dı–th) sayings of the Prophet Muhammad hajj pilgrimage to Mecca that every able Muslim should perform, one of the five pillars of Islam h. alı–b zaʿfara–n hot milk laced with saffron h. alwa sweets made with cornstarch, saffron, and nuts ha–mu–r regional Gulf grouper fish h. ara–m forbidden under Islamic law Hawala Sunni community of mixed Arab and Iranian heritage/background Haydar Shiʿa sword procession in commemoration of Imams Ali and Husayn hijrah (adj. hijrı–) the flight of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622 a.d., marking the beginning of the Muslim calendar ift. a–r breaking of the fast ʿima–ma turban ʿiqa–l black fabric band that holds the ghutra in place jabal mountain jangily greenery in the desert kafan material for enshrouding the dead Khaliji (n. Khalij) person from the Gulf, literally “Gulfie” khubz bread, usually flatbread or pitta khud. ra green / greenery Ma–ʾ al-Luqa–h. palm water (Ma–y al-Liga–h. in Bahraini dialect) maʾtam (pl. maʾa–tim) religious community center Maghrib Muslim daily prayers, after sunset majlis reception room for male guests, a place for sitting manz. ar t. abı–ʿı– landscape; “natural”; “beautiful” scenery mashmu–m sweet basil masjid mosque minbar pulpit mughtas. aba land with disputed ownership Muharram first month of the Islamic calendar nadhr promise to Allah signified through a green ribbon worn on the wrist nakhl date palm

glossary

175

nakhla–wi a person specialized in pollinating date palms Nowruz Persian new year pa–cha dish made from sheep’s brains eaten in a soup with bread for breakfast qalʿa fort; Qalʿat Al-Bahrain, “Bahrain Fort” qana– (pl. qanawa–t) underground water channel qibli (of ) the south Qurʾan the sacred book of Islam s. a–fy rabbitfish sa–hil coast sayyid (pl. sa–da, f. sayyida) descendant of the Prophet Muhammad sharqi (of ) the east sheikh (m. pl. shuyu–kh, f. sheikha, f. pl. sheikha–t) member of ruling family, person with religious knowledge, or an elderly person Shiʿi (pl. Shiʿa) follower of the Shiʿa sect of Islam shirk idolatry “Shlawnak?” literally “What’s your color?” (“How are you?”) sı–f beach or shoreline Sunni follower of the Sunni sect of Islam suq market Su–shi colloquial term for someone who identifies as mixed Sunni and Shiʿi thawb (pl. thiya–b) traditional men’s garment, often white tikka small pieces of grilled meat ʿu–d perfume derived from the agar tree Umm Mother (of ), e.g., Umm Isa, “Mother of Isa” ʿulamaʾ (sing. ʿa–lim) Islamic religious scholars wa–h. id one waqf (pl. awqa–f) asset or foundation for managing assets dedicated to charitable purposes zakat almsgiving, one of the five pillars of Islam

This page intentionally left blank

List of Named Participants

(All names have been changed) Abbas

retired professional, Shiʿi (Baharna)

Mr. Ahmadi

Manama business owner

Alfie

retired, British expatriate

Alireza

retired, Shiʿi (ʿAjam)

Bernardo

photographer, Lebanese-born

Mrs. Brown

homeowner, British expatriate

Mrs. Dunne

homeowner, British expatriate

Dr. Gazi

botanist, Bangladeshi, Sunni

George

British-born professional, convert to Islam

Hamad

hospital porter, Latif ’s son, Shiʿi (Baharna)

Ibrahim

occupation unknown, Latif ’s son, Shiʿi (Baharna)

Ilias

taxi driver and handyman, Pakistani-born, Sunni

Isa

civil servant, Shiʿi (ʿAjam) and Sunni (Hawala) mix

Ismaʿil

medical doctor, Shiʿi (ʿAjam, Scottish wife)

Jane

housewife, Filipino, Pentecostal Christian

Juma

accountant, Shiʿi (Baharna) 177

178

list of named participants

Mr. Kareem

manager of “cold store,” Keralite

Mr. Kazi

adviser to minister, Bangladeshi-born, Sunni

Latif

civil servant and entrepreneur, Shiʿi (Baharna)

Maagid

Shiʿi, U.K. resident

Maha

Egyptian, Ramzi’s wife

Mahdi

poet, Shiʿi (Baharna)

Mahmoud

photographer, Shiʿi ( Baharna)

Maryam

architect, civil servant

Michel

chef, Syrian, Christian

Muhammad

civil servant, Egyptian Sunni

Nabil

real estate agent, Lebanese Sunni

Philippe

hairdresser, French

Rania

environmentalist, Syrian-born, Sunni

Rashid

civil servant, Shiʿi (Baharna)

Samia

Syrian, Michel’s wife

Sayyed Hashem

pilot, Shiʿi (Baharna)

Shahab

architect, Shiʿi (ʿAjam) and Sunni (Hawala) mix

Umm Isa

Isa’s mother, Sunni (Hawala)

Mr. and Mrs. White

retired British expats

Dr. Youssef

architect and planner, Eygptian Copt

Bibliography

Agius, Dionysius A. Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008. Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Allen, Stan. Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Appadurai, Arjun. “Comments on ‘The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine.’ ” Social Science and Medicine 27, no. 3 (1988). . The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. . Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Barry, Michael. Color and Symbolism in Islamic Architecture: Eight Centuries of the Tile-maker’s Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995. Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. Battesti, Vincent. “Cairo Zoo.” In Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East, edited by Diane Singerman and Paul Amar. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006. Belgrave, Charles Dalrymple. Personal Column. London: Hutchinson, 1960. 179

180

bibliography

. Siwa: The Oasis of Jupiter Amon. London: John Lane, 1923. Belgrave, James Hamad Dacre. Welcome to Bahrain. Stourbridge, Worchestershire: Mark & Moody, 1954. Belgrave, Robert. “C. Dalrymple Belgrave: The Early Years as Adviser in Bahrain.” In Bahrain through the Ages: The History, edited by Abdullah bin Khalid Al-Khalifa and Michael Rice. New York: Kegan Paul, 1993. Bell, James. “He Said Forward to the Backward!” Life, November 17, 1952. Bender, Barbara. Landscape Politics and Perspectives. Providence: Berg, 1993. Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. Berlin, Brent, and Paul Kay. Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Bino, Marad J., Nasser L. Faruqui, and Asit K. Biswas, eds. Water Management in Islam. Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2001. Biwas, Asit K., Egal Rached, and Cecilia Tortajada. Water as a Human Right for the Middle East and North Africa. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2008. Bloch, Maurice. “Why Trees, Too, Are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life.” In The Social Life of Trees, edited by Laura Rival. New York: Berg, 1998. Boas, Franz. “Beiträge zur Erkentniss der Farbe des Wassers / Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water.” PhD diss., University of Kiel, 1881. Borneman, John, and Abdellah Hammoudi. Being There: The Fieldwork Encounter and the Making of Truth. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Bradley, Keith. “Land of the Two Seas.” Saudi Aramco World, November /December 1964, 18–25. http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/196406 /land.of.the.two.seas.htm. Brenner, Neil, and Christian Schmid, “Planetary Ubanization.” In Urban Constellations, edited by Matthew Gandy, 10–13. Berlin: Jovis, 2011. Bulloch, Angela, “Angela Bullock in Conversation with Michael Archer.” In Prime Numbers: Angela Bulloch, 252. Cologne: Walther König, 2005. Byrne, Alex, and David Hilbert. Readings on Color: The Philosophy of Color. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Singerman, Diane, and Paul Amar, eds. Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2006. Careri, Francesco. Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002. Caton, Steven C. Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. . Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

bibliography

181

Cornes, M. D., and C. D. Cornes. The Wild Flowering Plants of Bahrain: An Illustrated Guide. London: Immel Publishing, 1989. Cronin, William. Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: Norton, 1996. Dailami, Ahmed al-. “ ‘Purity and Confusion’: The Hawala between Persians and Arabs in the Contemporary Gulf.” In The Persian Gulf in Modern Times: People, Ports, and History, edited by Lawrence G. Potter, 299–326. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Deeb, Lara. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shiʿi Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Doherty, Gareth, ed., New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2011. . Review of Cairo Cosmopolitan by Diane Singerman and Paul Amar. International Journal of Middle East Studies 42, no. 4 (2010): 725–26. Doherty, Gareth, and Charles Waldheim, eds. Is Landscape . . . ? Essays on the Identity of Landscape. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2016. Ellen, Roy. “Palms and the Prototypicality of Trees.” In The Social Life of Trees, edited by Laura Rival. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Elliot, John. “Master Planning with a Land Rover.” In Al Manakh: Dubai Guide, Gulf Survey, Global Agenda, edited by Ole Bouman, Mitra Khoubrou, and Rem Koolhaas. Netherlands: Stichting Archis, Moutamarat, AMO, 2007. Faust, Drew G. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Fibiger, Thomas. “ʿAshuraʾ in Bahrain: Analyses of an Analytical Event.” Social Analysis 54, no. 3 (Winter 2010): 29–46. doi:10.3167/sa.2010.540302. . “Heritage Erasure and Heritage Transformation: How Heritage Is Created by Destruction in Bahrain.” International Journal of Heritage Studies, June 24, 2014. doi: 10.1080/13527258.2014.930064. . “Sectarian Secularism: The Role of Secularities in Bahrain.” In Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual, edited by Nils Ole Bubandt and Martijn van Beek, 163–82. Abingdon, U.K.: Oxon, 2012. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). “The State of Bahrain.” Accessed July 1, 2006. http://www.fao.org/fi/fcp/en/bhr/profile .htm. Forman, Richard T. T. Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions. Cambridge, U.K.: University of Cambridge Press, 1995. . Road Ecology: Science and Solutions. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2003. Fuccaro, Nelida. Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Gardner, Andrew. City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 2010.

182

bibliography

Gass, William. On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. Jaff rey, NH: Nonpareil Books, 1976. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Ghannam, Farha. Remaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Gold, Ann Grodzins, and Bhoju Ram Gujar. In the Time of Trees and Sorrows: Nature, Power and Memory in Rajasthan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Hall, Marcus. Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Hara, Kenya. White. Zurich: Lars Müller, 2007. Hamblin, Dora Jane. “Has the Garden of Eden Been Located at Last?” Smithsonian 18, no. 2 (1987): 127–35. Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge, 1997. . The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Hoeppe, Götz. Why the Sky Is Blue: Discovering the Color of Life. Translated by John Stewart. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Holston, James. The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Højlund, Flemming. Glob Og Paradisets Have: De Danske Ekspeditioner Til Den Arabiske Golf / Glob and the Garden of Eden: The Danish Expeditions to the Arabian Gulf. Højbjerg: Moesgård Museum, 1999. Jellicoe, Geoff rey, and Susan Jellicoe. The Landscape of Man. London: Thames and Hudson, 1987. Kahf, Mohja. “Purple Ihram and the Feminine Beatitudes of Hajj.” In New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color, edited by Gareth Doherty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated by Michael Sadlier. New York: Dover, 1977. Karimi, Sawsan Ghuloom. “Dress and Identity: Culture and Modernity in Bahrain.” PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2003. Kazeni, Arash. Sky Blue Stone: The Turquoise Trade in World History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Keating, Aileen. Mirage: Power, Politics, and the Hidden History of Arabian Oil. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005. Khalifa, Shaikh Abdullah bin Khalid al-, and Michael Rice, eds. Bahrain through the Ages: The History. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993.

bibliography

183

Khalifa, Shaikha Haya Ali al-, and Michael Rice, eds. Bahrain through the Ages: The Archaeology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986. Khunji, Farida Mohammed Saleh. The Story of the Palm Tree. Bahrain: Ministry of Information, first edition 1978, second edition 2003. Khuri, Fuad I. An Invitation to Laughter: A Lebanese Anthropologist in the Arab World. Edited by Sonia Jalbout Khuri. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. . Tribe and State in Bahrain: The Transformation of Social and Political Authority in an Arab State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Koolhaas, Rem. “Advancement versus Apocalypse.” In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty. Zurich: Lars Müller, 2010, 56–71. Larsen, Curtis E. Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Laursen, Steffen. “Rapid Urbanization and Cultural Heritage Management in Bahrain: Reconstructing the Original Distribution of Bronze Age Burial Mounds from a 1959 Aerial Photograph Archive.” In Landscapes through the Lens: Aerial Photographs and Historic Environment, edited by David C. Cowley, Robin A. Standring, and Matthew J. Abicht, 207–14. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010. Lipsky, Michael. Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980. Long, Richard. Walking the Line. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Lorimer, John Gordon. Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia. Vol. 2. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India, 1908. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Mahmoud, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Malinowski, Bronislaw. “Method and Scope of Anthropological Fieldwork.” In Ethnographic Fieldwork: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Jeff rey A. Sluka. Oxford: Wiley, 2012. McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002. Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky. New York: Vintage Books, 2002. Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2010. Moore, Kathryn. Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2010. Mostafavi, Mohsen, and Gareth Doherty, eds., Ecological Urbanism. Rev. ed. Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016.

184

bibliography

Nabi, Mohammad Noor al-. The History of Land Use and Development in Bahrain. Manama: Information Affairs Authority, 2012. Nasr, Vali. The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future. New York: Norton, 2006. Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Seattle: Wave Books, 2009. Nugent, Jeff rey B., and Theodore H. Thomas. Bahrain and the Gulf: Past, Perspectives and Alternative Futures. Abingdon, U.K.: Routledge, 2016. Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul. Translated by Maureen Freely. New York: Knopf, 2005. . My Name Is Red. New York: Vintage, 2002. Pastoureau, Michel. The Colours of Our Memories. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2012. Phillips, Diana Charles. Wild Flowers of Bahrain: A Field Guide to Herbs, Shrubs, and Trees. Manama: Arabian Printing, 1988. Picon-Lefebvre, Virginie. Desert Tourism: Tracing the Fragile Edges of Development. Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2011. Porter, Tom, and Byron Mikellides. Colour for Architecture Today. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2009. Qadaffi, Muammar. The Green Book / Al-Kita–b al-akhd. ar. London: Martin, Brian & O’Keeffe, 1976. Qaed, Hameed Al, ed. Pearl, Dreams of Shell: Anthology of Contemporary Bahrain Poetry. Manama: Shaikh Ebrahim Center for Culture and Research, 2007. Qasimi, H. H. Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Mohamed Al. The Gulf in Historic Maps 1478–1861. Leicester: Streamline Press, 1999. Raffles, Hugh. In Amazonia: A Natural History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Raouf, Mohamed Abdel, and Mari Luomi, eds. The Green Economy in the Gulf. New York: Routledge, 2016. Rawsthorn, Alice. “The Toxic Side of Being, Literally, Green.” New York Times, April 4, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/arts/05iht-design5 .html. Report on Preparation of Greater Manama Master Plan, 1. Manama: Physical Planning Unit, Government of Bahrain, December 3, 1972. Riley, Charles A., Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995. Rival, Laura, ed. The Social Life of Trees: Anthropological Perspectives on Tree Symbolism. New York: Berg, 1998. Robbins, Paul. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007.

bibliography

185

Rumaihi, Mohammed Ghanim. Bahrain: Social and Political Changes since the First World War. Kuwait: University of Kuwait, 1975. Sanjek, Roger. “A Vocabulary for Fieldnotes.” In Fieldnotes—The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Sarkis, Hashim. “One Thousand Courtyards: Observations on the Courtyard as a Recurring Design Element.” In The Courtyard: From Cultural Reference to Universal Relevance, edited by Nasser O. Rabbat. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Seherr-Thoss, Sonia. Design and Color in Islamic Architecture. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968. Sergeant, R. B. “Customary Irrigation Laws among the Baharna of Bahrain.” In Bahrain through the Ages: The History, ed. Shaikh Abdullah bin Khalid Al-Khalifa and Michael Rice. London: Kegan Paul, 1993. Siddiq, Mohammad Yusuf. “An Ecological Journey in Muslim Bengal.” In Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust, edited by Richard C. Foltz, Frederick M. Denny, and Azizan Baharuddin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Spirn, Anne Whiston. The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery. Wolf Tree Press, 2014. . The Granite Garden; Urban Nature and Human Design. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Stilgoe, John R. Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. New York: Walker, 1998. Swearer, Donald K. “Religious Studies and Ecological Urbanism.” In Ecological Urbanism, edited by Mohsen Mostavai with Gareth Doherty. Zurich: Lars Müller, 2016. Swirnoff, Lois. The Color of Cities: An International Perspective. New York: McGraw Hill, 2000. Taussig, Michael. What Color Is the Sacred? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Tebbe, Friederike. Farbräume / Color Spaces. Berlin: Jovis, 2009. Torr, Rebecca. “Give Beaches to the Public.” Gulf Daily News, August 22, 2008. Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Twigger, Robert. Red Nile: A Biography of the World’s Greatest River. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013.

186

bibliography

Waldheim, Charles. “Aerial Representation and the Recovery of Landscape.” In Recovering Landscape, edited by James Corner. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. . The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. Waly, Tarek. Private Skies: The Courtyard Pattern in the Architecture of the House. Bahrain: Al Handasah Center, 1992. Wardle, Huon. An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston, Jamaica. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000. Wheatcroft, Andrew. Bahrain in Original Photographs 1880–1961. London: Kegan Paul, 1998. Wick, Alexis. The Red Sea: In Search of Lost Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Wilkinson, J. C. Water and Tribal Settlement in South East Arabia: A Study of the Aflaj in Oman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Williams, A. “Why We Need More Open Spaces.” Gulf Daily News, August 28, 2008. Willis, R. P. Geology of the Arabian Peninsula, Bahrain—Geological Survey Professional Paper 560–E. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. . Remarks on Color. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Wright, Steven. “Fixing the Kingdom: Political Evolution and Socio-Economic Challenges in Bahrain.” In Occasional Papers. Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University, Qatar, 2010. Yaneva, Albena. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2009.

Index

Aali village, 118 abayas (women’s robes), 72 abstraction, 35–38 Abu Dhabi, 61, 127–28 adha-n (call to prayer), 131 Adhari Park, 126 Adliya, 12, 139 advertising, 19, 22, 57, 61, 121, 128–33, 135–36 aerial image, 35–38 aesthetics, 8, 51, 54, 90, 97–98, 121, 130, 132, 139, 146–47, 151, 167n7 afla-j (water channels), 77 agriculture: conservation and, 58, 92, 97–100, 138, 149, 167n7; date palms and, 95 (see also date palms); declining interest in, 84–87; GIS and, 86; green and, 8–10, 24, 33, 47, 50–54, 58, 77–78, 83, 85–89, 93–97, 101, 108, 121–22, 127, 135, 138, 152; hydroponics and, 54; irrigation and, 17–18, 47–51, 54, 59, 77, 86, 88, 95, 101, 103, 108, 117, 122, 126–27, 131–32, 137, 144, 150, 152; loss of profitability in, 54; Manama greenbelt and, 91–101; Ministry for Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs and, 54, 78, 101; traditional practices for, 54; treated sewage effluent (TSE) and, 18, 48, 52–54, 95, 128, 131, 152–53

Ahl al-Bayt (the Prophet Muhammad’s household), 63–64, 68 Ahmed Abdul Rahim coffee shop, 55 Ain Adhari, 47–49, 126, 132 Ain Qasari, 47 ʿAjam (Bahraini Shʿia of Persian descent), 9, 12, 32, 64, 69–70, 84, 104 Ajman, 61 Ajmi, Ahmed, 107 ʿajwa (Medina date), 81 Al Ain, 127 Alba, 13, 52, 85 al-barr (desert), 8, 119 Albers, Josef, 58, 151 Al-Dur, 52 Alfie, 30 al-h. amdu l-illa-h (“Praise be to God”), 153 Ali Bahrani, Khamees, 83 Alireza, 9, 19–20, 41, 43, 45, 48, 61, 64–68, 83–84, 87, 105, 110, 118, 139, 168n12 Al Jaser Factory Company, 80 Al Kamel Factory for Distillation of Pollen Water and Herbs, 80–81 Al-Khalifa family, 11, 15, 66, 83, 94, 113, 120, 126 Al-Khamis Mosque, 64 al-khud. ra (greenery), 2

187

188

index

al-Maktoum, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid, 128 Al-Manakh Continued (Reisz), 17 al-Qasimi, Dr. Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed, 116 al-rawla (banyan tree), 116 al-sala-m ʿalaykum (“Peace be upon you”), 69 Al Sondos Green Stores, 135 Amar, Paul, 31 AMA University, 28 American Mission Hospital, 69 Amwaj Island, 12, 46, 88, 132, 147 anthropology, 16, 26, 32–33, 38–42, 45, 58, 62, 80, 90, 144, 148 Appadurai, Arjun, 103 aquifers, 13, 49 Arabian Gulf University (AGU), 15, 54 Arabian Sea, 49 Arab Spring, 16, 20, 122–24, 143 artificial islands, 5, 11, 14, 44, 46, 56, 94, 147 ʿAshuraʾ (Imam Husayn’s martyrdom), 18, 31, 67–75, 164nn12,16 Askar, 112 autumn, 107, 141–42 a-ya-t (signs of nature), 132 ʿAyn al-Dubiyya, 47 ʿayn (spring), 47 ʿazada-rı– (Muharram procession), 70 Bab Al Bahrain (Gateway to Bahrain), 55–56, 76, 91 Babylonians, 15 ba-ghcheh (small garden), 126 ba-gh (garden), 126 Baharna (Bahraini Arab), 11–12, 25, 31–32, 48, 83, 85, 98–99, 107 Bahrain: Adliya, 12, 139; alcohol consumption and, 13; Al-Khalifa family and, 11, 15, 66, 83, 94, 113, 120, 126; Amwaj Island and, 12, 46, 88, 132; arid climate of, 3; artificial islands and, 5, 10–11, 14, 44, 46, 56, 94, 147; Budaiya, 11–12, 22, 42, 70, 84, 89, 106, 129, 140; burial mounds in, 77–78, 88, 118; causeways and, 13–14, 64, 92, 108, 110, 115, 125; climate of, 6, 29; complex history of, 6; crown prince and, 14, 60, 94, 96; description of, 5–16; economic diversification of, 13–16; flag of, 61; Gateway to, 55–56, 76, 91; Greater Ghawar Uplift and, 10; Great Maritime Truce and, 61; hard/soft infrastructures of, 1–2; Hidd, 11, 42, 46, 52; historical perspective on, 77–78; Juffair, 12, 16, 22, 112; as Land

of Eternal Youth, 77; light of, 40–42; literature on, 16–17; Muharraq, 11, 46–47, 70, 81, 85, 92, 115, 119, 125; national pride and, 60; as oasis, 6; oil and, 13; pearls and, 7–8, 47, 77, 156n10, 162n23; politics and, 13 (see also politics); population explosion of, 11; prime minister and, 14, 20, 23, 61, 93, 96, 126, 136; reclamation projects and, 5, 10, 14, 44–46, 49–50, 55–56, 89, 102, 136, 149; Reef Island and, 12; Riffa, 11, 42, 85, 88, 96, 98, 113, 120– 21, 128–29, 132–33; royal family and, 11, 14–15, 25, 66, 83, 94, 113, 120, 126; Saar, 12, 20, 30, 70, 102, 106; Shiʿi majority of, 70; as tax haven, 13; three-tier settlement of, 11–12; Trucial States and, 61; urbanism and, 1–2, 5, 10, 17–18, 26, 36–37 (see also urbanism); water and, 6–8, 13 (see also water) Bahrain Financial Harbour, 55, 76, 88–89 Bahrain Garden Club, 2, 9, 43, 120 Bahrain International Airport, 81 Bahrain International Garden Show, 44, 120, 141–43 Bahrain National Day, 60 Bahrain Rugby Club, 115 Bahrain through the Ages (Al Khalifa), 16 Bahrain Writers Society, 107 banyan trees, 116 BAPCO, 85 baraka (blessing), 68 barasti (palm frond huts), 118 barra-da (corner store), 31 Battesti, Vincent, 150–51 beige, 17; barasti (fronds) and, 118; Belgrave and, 105–7; buildings and, 118–19; Catholic Church and, 117–18; gardens and, 105– 6; Islam and, 108; jangily and, 19, 103–4, 141; poetry and, 107–10; rain and, 103–4, 108–9, 111–12; Rolla Square and, 116–17; shrublets and, 19, 104; VIP roads and, 112–13 Belgrave, Charles Dalrymple, 45, 132; beige and, 105–7; decline in agriculture and, 85; Gateway to Bahrain and, 55, 76, 91; Holmes and, 10; hues of sea and, 40, 44, 59; Life magazine and, 106–7; on Manama, 125–26; Personal Column and, 106; as prime minister, 23; routine of, 105–6; Siwa: The Oasis of Jupiter Ammon and, 106, 169n3; on sweet water, 47; World War I and, 106 Belgrave, James Hamad Dacre, 45, 65, 161n4

index Bell, James, 119 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 37 Berlin, Brent, 144, 170n2 Bernardo, 40, 42, 53 Bin Rajab family, 66–67 black, 123; ʿAshuraʾ and, 63, 67–75; banners and, 63, 67; clothing and, 63, 65, 138; flags and, 61, 65–66; green as new black and, 146; pavement and, 62; sky and, 43, 116 Black & Green Boutique, 135 Bloch, Maurice, 148 blood, 66–68, 72–75, 165n24 blue, 17; advertising and, 57–58; as aid to seeing green, 44; altitude and, 42–43; as America’s favorite color, 57–58; coastline ownership and, 56–57; cyanometer and, 42; environmental issues and, 58; fountains and, 55–56, 116; freshwater and, 46–48; Gass on, 43–44; as insect repellant, 55; Kandinsky on, 44; as main background color, 43; Marjorelle, 44; as the new green, 57; Pantone Color Institute and, 57–58; sea and, 44–46; sky and, 40–42, water and, 48–49 (see also water); wavelength and, 44; words associated with, 57–58; with yellow sand to make green, 50, 58–59 blue greens, 6, 46, 133, 144 Boas, Franz, 45–46 Bollywood, 113 Book of Genesis, 7 BP, 135 Braungart, Michael, 150 bright green, 17, 19; agency of, 121; gardens and, 120, 122, 126–27, 130–32, 137; Green Community and, 129–33; green deserts and, 121–39; interior green and, 136; lawns and, 120–21, 127, 130–31, 133; national flag and, 61; Riffa Views and, 11, 42, 45, 88, 96, 98, 113, 120–21, 128–29, 132–33; Western influence on, 134–35 Bryant Park, 100 Budaiya, 11–12, 22, 42, 70, 84, 88–89, 106, 129, 140 buffer zones, 56, 89 Bullock, Angela, 136 Bunschoten, Raoul, 34 Buraimi, 127 burial mounds, 77–78, 88, 118 Burj Khalifa, 14 Burrows, Eric, 7–8 Bushehri family, 83

189

busta-n (garden), 23 Byrne, Alex, 4, 145 CABE (Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) Space, London, 99–100 Cairo, 31–32, 125, 148, 150 Cairo Cosmopolitan (Amar), 31 camping, 8, 27, 114, 123 Canary Wharf, London, 76 Careri, Fransesco, 34–35 Catholics, 11, 68, 117, 139, 171n14 Caton, Steven, 23, 31, 71 causeways, 13–14, 64, 92, 108, 110, 115, 125 cemeteries, 1, 33–34, 67, 139 Central Park, New York, 99–100, 134 Chaldean Christians, 117–18 chanʿad (mackerel), 29 chawchab (freshwater springs), 47 chlorophyll, 103, 146 CHORA, 34 City Centre Mall, 113 coastline, 49, 56–57 color: broader view of, 147–48; context and, 3–5; contrast and, 2, 8, 19, 58, 68, 78, 105, 108, 115, 118, 130–33, 143, 146, 148; object and, 3–4, 145–46, 155n5; rainbows and, 147; reflected light and, 45, 146; relationality of, 143–44, 151; space and, 145–46; subjectivity and, 151. See also specific color colorblindness, 163n1 color wheel, 42, 61 Connery, Sean, 30 conservation, 58, 92, 97–100, 138, 149, 167n7 “Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water” (Boas), 45–46 Cormes, Chris, 8 Cormes, Marion, 8 Corniche, 89, 124, 136 Cox, Maddison, 44 crown prince, 14, 60, 94, 96 cyanometer, 42 Dairy Queen, 28, 73 Dalton, John, 163n1 Dammam Aquifer, 13, 49 Dana Mall, 102–3 date palms, 17, 33; al-Khalifa and, 66; allure of, 78–79; as background color, 43; barasti (fronds) of, 118; camouflaged telecommunications towers and, 98; coastal regions and, 12; conservation and, 82, 92,

190

index

date palms (continued) 97–100, 138, 149, 167n7; cooling effects of, 82; courtyards and, 81–82; cultural heritage of, 78; decline of, 78, 84–87, 95, 152–53; environmental issues and, 8; female trees of, 87; first harvest of, 88; green and, 9, 18, 77–78; as halophytes, 88; hand pollination and, 87; health benefits of, 80–82; herbal water and, 80; Islamic law and, 95; lack of cambium in, 82; life span of, 87–88; male trees of, 87; Manama greenbelt and, 92–101; Ministry for Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs and, 78; naming of trees, 80; number of, 78; parties under, 82–84; Phoenix dactylifera cv. Khasab and, 41, 88; Phoenix dactylifera cv. Sefri and, 41, 88; planting distance for, 88; politics and, 80, 86, 90, 98, 101; preservation and, 95, 97–99, 101, 167n7; profitability of, 83; replanting, 88; Riffa Views and, 120–21; root system of, 82; salinity tolerance of, 88; shade from, 82–83, 97–98, 141; Shiʿa and, 78–79; social power of, 82–84; treated sewage effluent (TSE) and, 48, 52–53, 152–53; urban development and, 77–78, 84–87, 120, 122, 124–25, 127, 133, 135, 138; use of each part of, 81–82; varieties of, 87 Davidson, Christopher, 17 desalination, 6, 48, 52–54, 59 desert: Arab view of, 8; artificial islands and, 5, 11, 14, 44, 46, 56, 94, 147; camping in, 114; plants of, 104–5; Rolla Square and, 116–17; sand and, 57–58, 62, 88, 102, 110– 12, 114–15, 119; VIP roads and, 112–13 Desert Kingdom (Jones), 17 design anthropology, 38–39 Design with Nature (McHarg), 36 developers, 9, 18, 78, 96, 98, 131, 134, 136–37, 139 Dhaka, 92 Dilmunia, 7, 108, 132–33 dinar (Bahraini currency), 28, 44, 52–53, 83, 87, 95, 137 Does Money Grow on Trees? (CABE Space), 100 Doha, 128 Dubai, 5, 17, 58, 141, 158n34; climate of, 42; date palms and, 41; desalination and, 59; global real estate and, 13–14, 56; green and, 101, 123; light of, 41; low-income workers and, 116; Mamzar Park, 134; Pirate Coast and, 61; Public Parks and

Horticulture Department, 148; short history of, 6; sports and, 115; urbanism and, 96, 128–31, 146, 148, 150 Dubai, the City as Corporation (Kanna), 17 Dubai Investment Park, 129 Durand, E. L., 1, 86 Durrat al-Bahrain, 98, 112, 132 Dutch Boy, 57–58 Dynamics of Bingo Urbanism (Jensen), 17 Easter, 117 Eastern Arabian Aquifer, 49 Eco Green Waters Purification, 135 Economic Development Board (EDB), 14–15 Egypt, 31–32, 106, 125, 148, 150, 159n9, 169n3 Eid al-Fitr (breaking of Ramadan fast), 22 Eiseman, Leatrice, 57–58 Ellen, Roy, 82 Elliott, John, 127 Elshestawy, Yasser, 17 English, 30–31, 56, 103, 117, 123, 146–47 environmental issues: blue movement and, 58; buffer zones and, 56, 89; camouflaged telecommunications towers and, 98; coastlines and, 56–57; conservation and, 58, 92, 97–100, 138, 149, 167n7; decline of date palms and, 78, 84–87, 95, 152–53; desalination and, 6, 48, 52–54, 59; developers and, 9, 18, 78, 96, 98, 131, 134, 136– 37, 139; Green Community and, 129–33; greenwashing and, 57, 150; LEED and, 147; legal mechanisms for, 98–99; Manama greenbelt and, 91–101; oil and, 8–13, 17, 46–47, 50, 78, 81, 85, 135; preservation and, 95, 97–99, 101, 167n7; Riffa Views and, 88, 96, 120–21, 128–29, 132–33; sustainability and, 15, 43, 51–52, 96–97, 101, 121, 130, 137–39, 146–51, 170n22; treated sewage effluent (TSE) and, 18, 48, 52–54, 95, 128, 131, 152–53; VIP roads and, 112– 13; water and, 46, 50 (see also water) Environment Friends Society, 56 Epic of Gilgamesh, 7 ethnography: anthropological perspective and, 16, 26, 32–33, 38–42, 45, 58, 62, 80, 90, 144, 148; fieldwork and, 3, 16–17, 22, 26–27, 29, 31–32, 35, 37–39, 45–46, 67, 151, 159n8, 165n25; informants and, 28–29, 71, 103, 110, 114, 132, 134, 165n25; infra-reflexive approach to, 161n42; language and, 12, 16, 30–31, 56, 117, 144, 146, 156n10, 170n2; Malinowski and, 27; mul-

index tiple layers of, 29; politics and, 29 (see also politics); random sampling and, 34; walking and, 2–3, 26, 29, 33–35, 37, 69, 71, 107, 113, 125, 131 Euphrates River, 6–7 evil eye, 104 Exhibition Road, 22, 118 expatriates, 2; fieldwork with, 30–32, 47, 53, 63–64, 68, 149; gardens and, 141–42; Green Community and, 130–31; housing and, 9, 12–13, 22–23, 79, 130–31, 136–37; isolation of, 27–28; local reception of, 27–28; sports and, 115; urban green spaces and, 89; walking and, 112, 117; workers and, 13, 51, 55, 124; younger generation and, 104 Fakhro, Ali, 95 falaj (water channel), 48, 77, 82 fatwa (Islamic legal opinion), 73, 165n23 fertilizers, 150 fieldwork: abstraction and, 35–38; aerial image and, 35–38; anthropological perspective and, 16, 26, 32–33, 38–42, 45, 58, 62, 80, 90, 144, 148; Arabic and, 27; coffee shops and, 30, 55; design anthropology and, 38–39; ethnographic, 3, 16–17, 22, 26–27, 29, 31–32, 35, 37–39, 45–46, 67, 151, 159n8, 165n25; expatriates and, 30–32, 47, 53, 63–64, 68, 149; informants and, 28–29, 71, 103, 110, 114, 132, 134, 165n25; interlocutors and, 2, 4, 6, 15–16, 19, 21, 29–32, 35, 49–50, 61, 63, 65–66, 75, 78, 124, 162n23; interviews and, 29–30, 71, 107; methodologies for, 26–33; Ministry of Municipalities and, 24–26; photography and, 2, 29, 31, 34, 69; random sampling and, 34; spatial juxtaposition and, 35–38; walking and, 2–3, 26, 29, 33–35, 37, 69, 71, 107, 113, 125, 131 fils (1/1000 dinar), 30 flagellation, 72–74 Forman, Richard T.T., 28–29, 36–37, 97 fountains, 55–56, 116 freshwater, 3, 6, 46–50, 152 Friendship causeway, 14 Fuccaro, Nelida, 11, 16 Fujairah, 61 Garden of Eden, 7, 77, 101, 115, 120 Garden of Gethsemane, 117 garden parties, 141–43 gardens: Bahrain International Garden Show

191

and, 44, 120, 141–43; beige and, 105–6; bright green and, 120, 122, 126–27, 130– 32, 137; design of, 38, 44, 120, 122, 126, 143; good neighbors and, 9; green desert and, 120, 122, 126–27, 130–33, 137; Islam and, 108; landscape typologies and, 102; Manama and, 84, 91–101; orientation of, 143; public, 29, 36, 44; social prestige and, 120–21, 127, 130–31, 133; treated sewage effluent (TSE) and, 131; urbanism and, 120, 122, 126–27, 130–32, 137; water and, 47–50, 54–55. See also date palms Gass, William, 43–44 Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf (Lorimer), 78 Géant, 118 Geertz, Clifford, 32, 74–75 geographic information systems (GIS), 86 Ghannam, Farha, 31–32 ghutra (male headdress), 72 gidu (water pipe), 55 Gihon River, 7 Gold, Anne Grodzins, 103 Gold City, 1, 24 Google Earth, 24, 34–35 Greater Ghawar Uplift, 10 Great Maritime Truce, 61 green: agriculture and, 8–10, 24, 33, 47, 50–54, 58, 77–78, 83, 85–89, 93–97, 101, 108, 121–22, 127, 135, 138, 152; ʿAshuraʾ and, 67–75; Bahrain light and, 40–42; blue-green and, 6, 46, 133, 144; blue water and yellow sand, 50, 58–59; Cairo and, 148; chlorophyll and, 103, 146; color dissociation and, 2–3; color/object concepts and, 3–5; as compliment to red, 61; as component of the city, 144–45; daily importance of, 3; date palms and, 9, 18, 77–78; dynamic spatial organization and, 2–3; ecologies of, 151; environment and, 149–51; Hindus and, 139; identities of, 58; imaginary space and, 141; Indian flag and, 61–62; interior, 136; Iran and, 65–66; Islam and, 7, 18, 46, 63–65, 108, 132, 138–39; Kuwaiti women and, 138; latent patterns in, 2–3; LEED and, 147; memory and, 79; as mixture of blue and yellow, 50, 58–59, 144; monochrome, 9; as moral imperative, 1; Muhammad and, 63–64; as the new black, 146; oases and, 6, 10, 46, 58, 66, 88, 97, 99, 103, 106, 127, 129, 133, 143, 169n3; poetry and, 107–10; power of, 6–7, 18, 139, 141; rain and, 103– 4, 108–9, 111–12; reduction of, 8–9; rela

192

index

green (continued) tionship with white, 143; relief of, 76–77; as remedy, 149; revolution and, 65–66; Shiʿa and, 18, 63–65; Sunni and, 18, 63–64, 66; symbolic meaning of, 62–63; as synecdoche for landscape, 4–5, 144; turbans and, 65; as urban antidote, 76–77; as urbanism, 144; variety of contexts for, 146–47; water as fundamental to, 50, 150 Green Book (Qaddafi), 64 Green Campaign for the Future, 147 Green Community, 129–33 green deserts: advertising and, 128–32; bright green and, 121–39; constructing, 122; contrast with Gulf and, 127–28; definition of, 121; gardens and, 120, 122, 126– 27, 130–33, 137; Green Community and, 129–33; interior green and, 136; leadership and, 125–27; parks and, 125–27; politics and, 121–24; purpose of, 134–35; recreation and, 122–25; Riffa Views and, 11, 42, 85, 88, 96, 98, 113, 120–21, 128–29, 132–33; varieties of, 121; Western influence on, 134–35 greenery, 1; as anecdote for sadness, 7; constituent expectancy of, 3; date palms and, 84–87 (see also date palms); as disposable, 79; irrigation and, 17–18, 47–51, 54, 59, 77, 86, 88, 95, 101, 103, 108, 117, 122, 126–27, 131–32, 137, 144, 150, 152; jangily and, 19, 103–4, 141; landscape and, 1; lawns and, 8–9, 32, 50, 96, 116, 120–21, 127, 130–31, 133, 148, 150; Manama greenbelt and, 91–101; politics and, 3 (see also politics); problems solved by, 9–10; rainbow symbolism and, 147–48; travel for, 122–24; urban, 1, 6, 99–100, 147 green lists, 147 Green Movement, 65 Green Oasis, 88, 129 Green Revolution, 65–66 Green Sea, 6, 44, 149, 156nn11,12 Green Stores, 135 greenwashing, 57, 150 groundwater, 46, 52–54, 82, 126 Guattari, Félix, 151 Gufool: Diary Queen in, 73; as fieldwork base, 20, 23, 69, 72–74, 99, 102, 107, 112– 13, 118; light of, 40; Manama and, 23, 40, 73–74, 112; mosques of, 64; springs and, 49; sweet basil of, 67; water channels and,

49; Water Gardens of, 23, 91–92, 126; Zinj and, 95 Gujar, Bhoju Ram, 103 Gulf Air, 116 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 13, 19, 158n37, 166n16 Gulf Daily News (newspaper), 22, 56, 142 hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), 7 hajj (Meccan pilgrimage), 105, 138 h. alı–b zaʿfara-n (saffron milk), 71 halophytes, 88, 115 h. alwa (sweets), 81 Hamad, King, 14, 44 Hamad Town, 53, 78 Hammoudi, Abdellah, 38 ha-mu–r (grouper fish), 29 Hand of Mary, 19, 104–5 h. ara-m (forbidden), 53, 95 Hashem, Sayyed, 60, 62 Hawala (Sunnis with Arab and Persian influences), 12, 21 Haydar (Shiʿa sword procession), 68, 72–74 Henson, F.R.S., 49 herbal water, 80–81 Hidd, 11, 42, 46, 52 High Line, New York, 99, 100 Hilbert, David, 4, 145 Hindus, 62, 115, 117, 139 Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf (Fuccaro), 16 Hoeppe, Götz, 42 Holes, Clive, 16 Holmes, Frank, 10, 126 Holy Communion, 117 hospitality, 28 housing, 9, 22, 31–33, 56, 79, 85, 92, 118, 126, 133 Humboldt, Alexander von, 42–43 humidity, 41, 161n4 Husayn, Imam, 63, 65, 67–75, 164n12 Hyde Park, London, 134 hydroponics, 54 Ibn al-Biruni, 42 Ibn Khaldun, 6–7 idolatry, 117 ift. a-r (breaking fast), 81 Ilias, 69, 73, 122–25, 128 ʿima-ma (turban), 64–65 Imam Sadiq Mosque, 64 In Amazonia: A Natural History (Raffles), 37 India, 11, 55, 61, 65, 84, 103, 116

index Indian Ocean, 6, 50, 156nn11,12 informants, 28–29, 71, 103, 110, 114, 132, 134, 165n25 infrastructure: causeways and, 13–14, 64, 92, 108, 110, 115, 125; desalination and, 6, 48, 52–54, 59; hard vs. soft, 1–2; housing and, 9, 22, 31–33, 56, 79, 85, 92, 118, 126, 133; irrigation and, 17–18, 47–51, 54, 59, 77, 86, 88, 95, 101, 103, 108, 117, 122, 126–27, 131–32, 137, 144, 150, 152; politics and, 3, 5–6, 10–20, 29 (see also politics); reclamation projects and, 5, 10, 14, 44–46, 49–50, 55–56, 89, 102, 136, 149; relationalities and, 143–44; roundabouts and, 9, 53, 55, 60, 89, 96, 102, 113, 121, 122–24, 133; Saudi Arabia and, 14–16, 110, 115 insha-llah (“God willing”), 27 interior green, 136 Internet, 22–24 Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz), 32 interviews, 29–30, 71, 107 Iran, 18, 20, 64–66, 69–70, 110, 147, 159n9, 164nn13,14, 168n12 Iraq, 20, 47, 65, 68–70, 110, 128 Ireland, 11, 71, 108, 142 Irish Republican Army, 71 irrigation, 108, 117, 144, 150, 152; ancient, 77; artesian wells and, 86; constructing a green desert and, 122, 126–27, 131–32, 137; demand for, 17–18, 51; desalination and, 54, 59; drip, 88; Dubai and, 59; hydroponics and, 54; Iraq and, 47; religious laws on, 48–49; Saudi Arabia and, 50; springs and, 48; sustainability and, 101; TSE and, 95 (see also treated sewage affluent (TSE)) Isa, 6, 8, 19–20, 29–30, 54, 69, 74, 78–79, 102, 115, 119, 135, 140, 153 Isa Town, 78, 117 Isfahan, 64, 66, 147–48 Islam: beige desert and, 108; date palms and, 95; early geographers of, 6–7; five pillars of, 61; flagellation and, 72–73; gardens and, 108; green and, 7, 18, 46, 63–65, 108, 132, 138–39; Green Revolution and, 65–66; lunar calendar of, 67; martyrdom and, 63, 65, 67–75, 164nn12,16; mosques and, 46, 64, 67–68, 118, 131; Muhammad and, 7, 63–66, 68, 81, 164nn4,12; pilgrims and, 20, 47, 64, 69, 138; Ramadan and, 22, 81; treated sewage effluent (TSE) and, 53–54, 152; water and, 54; world finance

193

and, 13; zakat and, 24 See also Shiʿi; Sunni Istanbul (Pamuk), 31 Italian Stalker-/-Osservatorio Nomade urban art workshop, 34–35 jabal (mountain), 115 Jabal Al Dukhan (Mountain of Smoke), 115 jangily (desert greenery), 19, 103–4, 141 Jaww, 112 Jellicoe, Geoffrey, 35 Jellicoe, Susan, 35 Jensen, Boris Brorman, 17 Jones, Toby, 17 Jordan, 12, 60 Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Menoret), 17 Juffair, 12, 16, 22, 112 Juma, 62 jungle, 103 JWT, 57 kafan (shrouding material), 68 kaffiyeh, 72 Kaff Maryam, 19, 104–5 Kahf, Mohja, 138 Kandinsky, Wassily, 44 Kanna, Ahmed, 17 Karbala, 20, 68–69 Karimi, Sawsan, 63–64 Kay, Paul, 144, 170n2 Kazi, 92–94 Keralites, 31–32 Khalifa, Ali Abdulla, 108–9 Khalifa, Sheikh, 14 Khaliji (person from Gulf ), 134 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 69 khubz (bread), 28 khud. ra (greenery), 2, 7 Khunaizi datas, 87 Khuri, Fuad, 16, 40–41, 80, 84 King Fahd causeway, 13 King Faisal Highway, 55 King Hamad Highway, 112 Koolhaas, Rem, 150 Kuwait, 7, 13, 50, 66, 110, 112, 114–15, 127–28, 138, 156n18, 158n37, 159n9, 170n11 land ownership, 83, 95–96, 98–99 landscape: aesthetic context for, 8; agriculture and, 8–10, 24, 33, 47, 50–54, 58, 77–78, 83, 85–89, 93–97, 101, 108, 121–22, 127, 135, 138, 152; architecture and, 1,

194

index

landscape (continued) 35–38, 90, 145; as beautiful scenery, 2; fountains, 55–56, 116; gardens, 102 (see also gardens); hard/soft infrastructures of, 1–2; lawns, 8–9, 32, 50, 96, 116, 120– 21, 127, 130–31, 133, 148, 150; many typologies of, 1–2; parks, 47 (see also parks); politics and, 5; reclamation projects and, 5, 10, 14, 44–46, 49–50, 55–56, 89, 102, 136, 149; rural, 36, 77, 119; as synecdoche for green, 4–5, 144; urbanism and, 1–2, 5, 10, 17–18, 26, 36–37, 121, 128, 143–47; vertical transect and, 37–38; vs. geography, 38 Landscape of Man, The: The History of Landscape Architecture from Prehistory to the Present Day (Jellicoe and Jellicoe), 35 language, 12, 144, 156n10, 170n2; Arabic, 2, 6–7, 16–17, 19, 21, 27, 30–31, 47, 49, 70, 80, 82, 103–4, 116, 141, 153; English, 30–31, 56, 103, 117, 123, 146–47 Larsen, Curtis, 16, 86 Latif, 16, 19–20, 35, 63–64, 67–73, 84 Latour, Bruno, 39 lawns: American, 150; fertilizers and, 150; landscape and, 8–9, 32, 50, 96, 116, 120– 21, 127, 130–31, 133, 148, 150; pesticides and, 150 Lawrence of Arabia (film), 8 leadership, 11, 15, 125–27 Lebanon, 12–13, 49, 70, 78 Le Corbusier, 35–36 LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), 147 legal mechanisms, 98–99 Libya, 61, 63 Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands: The Geoarchaeology of an Ancient Society (Larsen), 16, 86 Life magazine, 106–7, 119 Long, Richard, 33 Lorimer, John Gordon, 78 Lynch, Kevin, 36 Maagid, 72 Ma-ʾ al-Luqa-h. (palm water), 80 Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Yaneva), 39 Maghrib (daily prayers), 84 Mahdi, 65–66, 107–8 Mahmoud, 19, 65, 69, 73 Mai, Sheikha, 62

majlis (male reception room), 15, 28, 51, 80 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 27 Mall of the Emirates, 129–30 Mamzar Park, Dubai, 134 Manama: arid climate of, 56; artificial islands of, 10–11; Bab Al Bahrain and, 55; Belgrave on, 125–26; Bollywood and, 113; camouflaged telecommunications towers and, 98; as capital, 11; Catholic Church and, 117; conservation and, 92, 97–100, 167n7; Corniche and, 89, 124, 136; date palms and, 92–101; foreign consultants and, 96–97; foreign workers and, 91; gardens and, 84; as Gold City, 24; greenbelt of, 18, 91–102, 107, 142; Gufool and, 23, 40, 73–74, 112; Kazi and, 92–94; legal mechanisms for, 98–99; low-income workers of, 12; Master Plan for, 91–95; maʾtam of, 63; Ministry of Municipalities and, 23–24, 26, 34; Ministry of Works and, 91–93; Munro and, 91–92; national park designation for, 100–101; new white buildings of, 119; parks and, 125– 27; Pearl Monument and, 124, 143, 169n2; political history of, 20; preservation and, 95, 97–99, 101, 167n7; reclamation projects and, 89; Royal Court and, 94; sea by, 46–47; Sheikh Salman Highway and, 94; as suburb of Mumbai, 13; suq of, 19, 22, 47, 55, 64, 67, 69, 69–72, 83, 105, 125, 135, 139; treated sewage effluent (TSE) and, 95; urban perceptions in, 16, 77; water and, 150; yellow building of, 119 manz. ar t. abı–ʿı– (landscape), 2 Marble Arch, 72 Marina Mall, 102 Marjorelle Blue, 44 martyrdom, 63, 65, 67–75, 164nn12,16 Maryam, 19, 21 masala, 30 mashmu–m (sweet basil), 34, 67–69, 74 Maʾtam Abdul Rasul Abdul Aal, 63 Maʾtam al-ʿAjam al-Kabir, 64 Maʾtam Bin Rajab, 24 Maʾtam Rajab, 66 maʾtam (religious community center), 24, 63–64, 66–67, 69–71, 74 McDonough, William, 150 McHarg, Ian, 35–36 Mecca, 105 Meloy, Ellen, 46 Menoret, Pascal, 17

index Michel, 117–18 minbar (pulpit), 63 Ministry for Municipalities and Agriculture Affairs, 23–26, 34, 54, 78, 101 Ministry of Works, Municipalities Affairs, and Urban Planning, 91–93 Modern Standard Arabic, 30–31 monarchy, 14–15 Monsoon (restaurant), 28 mosques, 46, 64, 67–68, 118, 131 Mount Bemavend, 42 mughtas. aba (disputed land), 99 Muhammad, Prophet, 7, 63–66, 68, 81, 164nn4,12 Muharram (first month of Islamic calendar), 67–70, 72, 84 Muharraq, 11, 46–47, 70, 81, 85, 92, 115, 119, 125 Munro, A.M., 91–92 My Name Is Red (Pamuk), 62 Nabil, 77–79 nadhr (promise ribbons), 64 Nakheel Road, 89 nakhl (date palm), 84 NASA, 35 national parks, 101, 167n7 Nirvana (restaurant), 30 North Town, 56 “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight” (Geertz), 74–75 “Notes on the Islands of Bahrain and Antiquities” (Durand), 1 Nowruz (Persian new year), 65, 84, 164n14 oases, 6, 10, 46, 58, 66, 88, 97, 99, 103, 106, 127, 129, 133, 143, 169n3 object, concept of, 3–5 Office for Metropolitan Architecture, 39 oil: Awali Oil Field and, 10; Bahrain and, 13; BP and, 135; depletion of, 13; discovery of, 11, 46–47, 78; Greater Ghawar Uplift and, 10; Holmes and, 10; pipelines for, 8–9; revenue from, 13, 85; strategic importance of, 50; urban development and, 11–12, 17, 78, 81, 85 Oman, 41, 49, 127, 156n11, 158n37 101 Things to Do in Bahrain (guide), 115 “On Saying Goodbye to the Lady in Green” (Khalifa), 108–9 Operation Desert Storm, 110 orange, 61, 67, 105 orchards, 77 Outside Lies Magic (Stilgoe), 37

195

Oxford English Dictionary, 147 pa-cha (breakfast soup), 71 Pakistan, 11, 61, 64–65, 69, 92, 122 Palm Road, 89 Pamuk, Orhan, 31, 62 Pantone Color Institute, 57–58, 61 parks: Ain Adhari, 47–48, 49, 126, 132; amusement, 48; Belgrave and, 91; Bryant Park, 100; camping and, 114; Central Park, 99–100, 134; Green Community and, 129–33; green deserts and, 125–27; Hyde Park, 134; infrastructure and, 36; irrigation and, 51; landscape typologies and, 1; leadership and, 125–27; Mamzar Park, 134; Manama and, 125–27; middle classes and, 135; monochrome green of, 9; national, 101, 167n7; recreation and, 123; relief of green and, 76–77; Rolla Square and, 116–17; roundabouts and, 9, 121–24; SOM master plan and, 137–38; value of urban greenery and, 99–100; Western influence on, 134–35 Pearl Monument, 124, 143, 169n2 Pearl Roundabout, 89, 102, 123–24, 143 pearls, 7–8, 47, 77, 156n10, 162n23 Persian Gulf, 6–7, 15–16, 78, 156nn10,12 Personal Column (Belgrave), 106 pesticides, 150 petunias, 60–61 photography, 125, 140; aerial, 35–38, 78; Bahrain’s light and, 40–42; Bernardo and, 40, 42, 53; fieldwork and, 2, 29, 31, 34, 69; Mahmoud and, 73; Professor Raymond and, 74 Physical Planning Directorate, 24 pilgrims, 20, 47, 64, 69, 138 Pirate Coast, 61 Pishon River, 7, 156n18 poetry, 107–10, 168n11 politics, 3, 59; Alireza and, 20; ‘Ashura and, 69–70, 75; crown prince and, 14, 60, 94, 96; date palms and, 80, 86, 90, 98, 101; ecosophy and, 151; green as new black and, 146; green deserts and, 121–24; historical intrigue and, 15–16; identity and, 31; importance of context and, 64; Ireland and, 71; leadership and, 11, 15, 125– 27; maintaining landscapes and, 5; Manama and, 20; monarchy and, 14–15; national pride and, 60; prime minister and, 14, 20, 23, 61, 93, 96, 126, 136; religion and, 64, 69; Robbins on, 150; royal

196

index

politics (continued) family and, 11, 14–15, 25, 66, 83, 94, 113, 120, 126; Shiʿa and, 11 (see also Shiʿi); social equilibrium and, 14; Sunnis and, 11 (see also Sunni); symbolic meanings and, 153; Syria and, 12, 117–18; tax havens and, 13; urbanization and, 6, 10, 147; water infrastructure and, 18, 50 pollen water, 80–81 Pollock, Jackson, 35 Pope Benedict XVI, 117, 169n19 Portuguese, 15 pragmatism, 3–4, 35, 97, 167n7 preservation, 95, 97–99, 101, 167n7 prime minister, 14, 20, 23, 61, 93, 96, 126, 136 Protestants, 11 Public Parks and Horticulture Department, Dubai, 148 purple, 40, 44, 47, 59, 138, 144 “Purple Ihram and the Feminine Beatitudes of Hajj” (Kahf ), 138 Qaddafi, Muammar, 64, 164n6 qalʿa (fort), 81 qana- (underground water channel), 47 Qatar, 7, 13–14, 16, 61, 66, 115, 124, 157n22, 158nn34,37, 159n9 qibli (Southern), 11 Qurʾan (Islamic sacred book), 7, 95, 108, 138 Raffles, Hugh, 37 rain, 103–4, 108–9, 111–12 Ramadan, 22, 81 Ramaking the Modern: Space, Relocation, and the Politics of Identity in a Global Cairo (Ghannam), 31 random sampling, 34 Rania, 58 Ras Abu Jarjur, 52 Ras al-Khaimah, 61 realism, 4 reclamation projects, 5, 10, 14, 44–46, 49–50, 55–56, 89, 102, 136, 149 recreation, 53, 83, 95, 113, 122, 124, 132, 135, 137 red, 17; ʿAshuraʾ and, 67–75; blood and, 66–68, 72–75, 165n24; as complement to green, 61; flagellation and, 72–73; Haydar and, 72–73; median strips and, 60–61; as national color, 18, 60–61; petunias and, 60–61; slaughtering and, 24, 67; symbolic meaning of, 62–63 Reef Island, 12

Reisz, Todd, 17 restaurants, 14, 28, 30, 118 Resurrection Flower, 19, 104–5 Riffa Views Signature Estates, 88, 96, 120–21, 128–29, 132–33 Rival, Laura, 82, 171n14 Rolla Square, 116–17 roundabouts, 9, 53, 55, 60, 89, 96, 102, 113, 121–24, 133 royal family, 11, 14–15, 25, 66, 83, 94, 113, 120, 126 Royal Horticultural Society, 141 Rumaihi, Mohammed Ghanim, 16 Saar, 12, 20, 30, 70, 102, 106 Sabika, Sheikha, 44, 120 Sacred Heart Church, 117 saffron, 29, 71, 81 s. a-fy (rabbitfish), 29 sa-h. il (coast), 44 Saint Ambrose, 117 Sakhir Palace, 115 Salman, Sheikh, 14–15 Samia, 117–18 sand, 57–58, 62, 88, 102, 110–12, 114–15, 119 Sarkis, Hashim, 43 Saudi Arabia, 19, 115, 124, 158n37, 159n9, 166n16; aquifers and, 49; cinemas and, 102; date palms and, 41, 88; Dilmum and, 7; flag of, 61, 63–64; infrastructure and, 14–16, 110, 115; irrigation and, 50; Juffair and, 112; King Faisal Highway and, 55; oil and, 13; rain and, 108; Shiʿa and, 70; Sunni and, 12 Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de, 42 sayyid (descendant of Prophet Muhammad), 65 scarves, 70, 111 sea, 44–46 Seef, 102, 113, 118 shade, 82–83, 97–98, 116, 141, 143 Shahab, 52 Sharjah, 61 sharqi (Eastern), 11 Sheikh Isa Air Base, 112 sheikh (member of ruling family, person with religious knowledge, or elderly person), 14, 23, 41, 44, 62, 64–66, 87, 94, 112, 116, 120, 126–30, 139, 142, 152, 156n10 Sheikh Salman Highway, 94, 142 Shiʿi (Islamic sect), 20; ʿAshuraʾ and, 63, 65, 67–75, 164nn12,16; date palms and, 78–79; flagellation and, 72–73; green and,

index 18, 63–65; Green Revolution and, 65–66; Haydar and, 68, 72–74; Husayn martyrdom and, 63, 65, 67–75, 164nn12,16; Imami, 164n4; Iran and, 164n13; Ministry of Municipalities and, 24; population of, 11; receptiveness of, 26; revival of, 15; Saudi Arabia and, 70; schism with Sunni, 14, 68–69; shrines and, 64, 69; Su–shi, 78; sweet basil and, 67; Twelver, 164n4; white and, 65 Shiʿi Waqf Directorate, 19, 99, 116 shirk (idolatry), 64 Shlawnak (“How are you?”), 153 Showaiter family, 81 shrines, 64, 69, 115 shrublets, 19, 104 sı–f (shoreline), 44, 55, 89, 102 Singapore, 10, 13, 99 Sitra Island, 13, 46, 52 Siwa: The Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (Belgrave), 106 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), 51, 137, 138 sky, 42–44 slaughtering, 24, 67 Smith, James, 96 snow, 108, 140–41 social equilibrium, 14 Social Life of Trees (Rival), 82 South Africa, 13 spatial juxtaposition, 35–38 Spivak, Gayatri, 157n24 sports, 114–15 spring, 19, 55, 84, 87, 104, 106, 124, 141–42, 164n14 springs, 6, 47–50, 86, 110, 152 Stilgoe, John R., 37, 41, 136 Strait of Hormuz, 6, 50 summer, 30, 42, 65, 82, 87, 103, 105, 118, 134, 140–43 Sunni (Islamic sect), 20, 79, 85, 122, 164n4; ʿAshuraʾ and, 69–70; Catholics and, 139; green and, 18, 63–64, 66; Green Revolution and, 65–66; Hawala, 12, 21; leadership and, 11, 25–26; majority parliament of, 14; Ministry of Municipalities and, 25; as nomadic descendants, 66; population of, 11; schism with Shiʿa, 14, 68–69; Su–shi, 78; Waqf Directorate and, 99 suq (market), 19–20, 22, 30, 34, 47, 55, 64, 67–70, 73, 83, 105, 116, 125, 135, 139 Su–shi (mixed Sunni and Shiʿi), 78 sustainability: conservation and, 58, 92,

197

97–100, 138, 149, 167n7; environmental issues and, 15, 43, 51–52, 96–97, 101, 121, 130, 137–39, 146–51, 170n22; preservation and, 95, 97–99, 101, 167n7 Swearer, Donald K., 147 sweet basil, 34, 67–69, 74 Syria, 12, 49, 117–18 Taussig, Michael, 58 tax havens, 13 temperature, 3, 43, 82, 103, 140–41, 146 thiya-b (traditional men’s garments), 34, 63, 72–73 Tigris River, 6–7 tikka (small pieces of grilled meat), 28 tourism, 55, 100–101, 115–16, 149 treated sewage effluent (TSE): agriculture and, 18, 48, 52–54, 95, 128, 131, 152–53; Arabian Gulf University (AGU) and, 54; cost of, 52–53; date palms and, 48, 52–53, 152–53; external conditions and, 53; gardens and, 131; Green Community and, 131; Islam and, 53–54, 152; Kuwait and, 128; Manama and, 95; public image of, 53–54; unpopularity of, 53 Tree of Life, 115 Tribe and State in Bahrain (Khuri), 16 Trucial States, 61 Tubli Bay, 53 Tunstall, Dori, 39 turbans, 64–65 Turkey, 64 turquoise, 6, 45–46, 64, 76, 79 ʿu–d (agar tree perfume), 134 ʿulamaʾ (Islamic religious scholars), 65 Umm al-Quwain, 61 Umm Isa, 28, 55, 87, 110, 142 Umm (Mother), 28, 55, 61–62, 87, 110, 142 UNESCO world heritage site, 77 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 16–17, 49, 61, 116, 121, 127–30, 158n37, 159n9 University of Bahrain, 122 unstable shelf, 49–51 Upper West Side, New York, 100 urban greenery, 1, 6, 99–100, 147 urbanism: advertising and, 19, 22, 57, 61, 121, 128–33, 135–36; aerial view and, 35–88; asphalt jungle and, 77; buffer zone and, 89–90; camouflaged telecommunications towers and, 98; color/space context for, 145–46; contemporary, 5, 37; Dana Mall and, 102–3; date palms and, 77–78,

198

index

urbanism (continued) 84–87, 120, 122, 124–25, 127, 133, 135, 138; developers and, 9, 18, 78, 96, 98, 131, 134, 136–37, 139; ecological, 77, 147; flatbed terrain and, 36; gardens and, 120, 122, 126–27, 130–32, 137; as green, 144; green deserts and, 121–39; horizontal surface and, 36; interconnectedness and, 77; interior green and, 136; landscape and, 1–2, 5, 10, 17–18, 26, 36–37, 121, 128, 143– 47; legal mechanisms against, 98–99; Manama greenbelt and, 91–102; profit and, 136–37; recreation and, 53, 83, 95, 113, 122–25, 132, 135, 137; Riffa Views and, 88, 96, 120–21, 128–29, 132–33; Rolla Square and, 116–17; rural landscape and, 36, 77, 119; value of greenery and, 99–100; vertical transect and, 37–38; VIP roads and, 112–13; Western influence on, 134–35; as worldwide condition, 165n1 VIP roads, 112–13 Virgin’s Spring, 47, 47–48 wa-ʿalaykum al-sala-m (“And upon you peace”), 173 wa-h. id (one), 28 Waldheim, Charles, 5, 36 walking: advantages of, 33–34; Bahrain climate and, 29; Careri on, 34–35; choosing routes for, 34; fieldwork and, 2–3, 26, 29, 33–35, 37, 69, 71, 107, 113, 125, 131; necessity of, 33–34; Stilgoe on, 37 waqf (charitable assets), 19, 98–99, 116 war, 10, 13, 16, 78, 106, 110 water: ablution, 74; afla-j and, 77; agriculture and, 8–10, 24, 33, 47, 50–54, 58, 77–78, 83, 85–89, 93–97, 101, 108, 121–22, 127, 135, 138, 152; as anecdote for sadness, 7; aquifers and, 13, 49; Bahrain and, 6–8, 13; coastline ownership and, 56–57; date palms and, 82; desalination and, 6, 48, 52–54, 59; fountains and, 55–56, 116; freshwater, 3, 6, 46–50, 152; as fundamental to green, 50, 150; gardens and, 47–50, 54–55; as from God, 54; groundwater, 46, 52–54, 82, 126; herbal, 80–81; humidity and, 41, 161n4; irrigation and, 17–18, 47–51, 54, 59, 77, 86, 88, 95, 101,

103, 108, 117, 122, 126–27, 131–32, 137, 144, 150, 152; Islam and, 54; Manama and, 150; as more important than oil, 50; oases and, 6, 10, 46, 58, 66, 88, 97, 99, 103, 106, 127, 129, 133, 143, 169n3; plentiful supply of, 47; rain, 103–4, 108–9, 111–12; reflection by depth of, 45–46; religious laws on, 48–49; sea and, 44–46; sources of, 51–54; springs and, 6, 47–50, 86, 110, 152; treated sewage effluent (TSE) and, 18, 48, 52–54, 95, 128, 131, 152–53; Tree of Life and, 115; unstable shelf and, 49–51; use of, 48–51; wells and, 7, 46, 48, 86, 126 Water Gardens, Gufool, 23, 91–92, 126 wells, 7, 46, 48, 86, 126 What Color Is the Sacred? (Taussig), 58 Wheatcroft, Andrew, 47, 47–48 white, 17, 19; as convergence of colors, 143, 151; flagellation and, 72–73; Haydar and, 68; imaginary space and, 141; language and, 170n2; median strips and, 60–61; as national color, 60–61; Pearl Monument and, 124, 143, 169n2; petunias and, 60–61; relationship with green, 143; Shiʿa and, 65; snow and, 108, 140–41; temperate landscape and, 143; turbans and, 64–65, 72 Wild Flowering Plants of Bahrain (Cormes and Cormes), 8 winter, 63, 103, 108, 113–14, 118, 141–42 World Financial Center, New York, 76 Yaneva, Albena, 39 yellow, 161n1, 170n2; advertising and, 135; aesthetics and, 145–46; afternoon light and, 40; combining with blue to make green, 50, 58–59, 144; date palms and, 41, 88; Hidd haze and, 42; Manama building and, 119; Poinciana and, 105; red next to, 151; saffron and, 29; sand and, 43, 50, 58–59, 110; walls and, 23 Yemen Chronicle (Caton), 23, 31 Youssef, Dr., 101 Yves Saint Laurent, 44 zakat (almsgiving), 24 Zayed, Sheikh, 127 Zayed Town, 127 Zinj, 49, 93–95, 107, 142