Thoughts on a Book about Belonging in Dubai
Reflections on Rana AlMutawa's "Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai"
Dear City Person,
I am back from my 1-month break and have decided to shift the frequency of my posts to once per month to give myself and readers more time to digest each post. To my new readers seeing this, I wanted to let you know that I have yet to update my About page or Welcome Email to reflect this change, but will do so soon!
As promised in my last post, today I will be sharing my thoughts on Rana Almutawa’s book called “Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai,” an ethnographic research about how middle and upper middle-class citizens and residents who lived in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) for an extended time experience its rapid and major developments and ways they try to belong within them even while they experience a sense of loss of old spaces.
If you are not familiar with what is “ethnography,” I encourage you to first click here to read this article before coming back here.
Please let me know if you have read AlMutawa’s book as I would love to read your thoughts on it. Or you can let me if you plan to read it at some point and share what is drawing you to it.
You can write to me by either replying privately to this email or posting a public comment on Substack by clicking on the button below.
Scroll down to find out where you can get a copy of the book (if you haven’t already) while supporting public libraries or independent bookshops and global literacy. To me, getting a book through these alternative ways is a small practice of belonging—of connecting to a sense of place and a larger humanity.
Some house keeping before I dive in…
If you are new to my free newsletter, Belonging Co-Lab, check out the About page linked here if you haven’t already and click here to see my previous posts. If you are viewing this from the Substack app and have not already subscribed, you may do so by clicking on the button below:
Most researchers and journalists I have seen writing about Dubai in English are either not from there or have not lived there for an extended period of time. While many bring up valid social, humanitarian, and environmental concerns which I wish were spoken about more openly in Dubai, their dominantly Western lens and limited connection with the city has me mistrust their motivations. I sometimes find their perspective lacking in nuance or at times representing only limited segments of the city.
When I first learned that AlMutawa published her book, I was excited to read it as it is refreshing to read perspectives by an Emirati academic like herself or by anyone who grew up here and lived here for a long time. However, for the same reason, I was wondering if it will be overly apologetic.
AlMutawa addresses this through stating her positionality in her book’s introduction and what opportunities and challenges this gave her as a result when working on her research. Here is a passage on this from the book that stood out to me in page 31:
“In a Twitter post with a high level of interactions, Kuwaiti academic Talal Al-Rashoud wrote: ‘As Gulf academics we often find ourselves in a delicate position. We must criticize the gross injustices plaguing our region, yet we must also debunk the potent orientalist discourse that all too often pervades such criticism. We thus end up attacking & defending simultaneously.’ This accurately reflects how I often felt about my academic experience, with one major caveat—that I had to also negotiate how to do this in a more constrained political context, for while Kuwaiti academics also engage in some self-censorship, they have a much larger space for academic freedom. Given this positionality, my place in the academy affords me both opportunities and limitations that shaped this book. The former includes the reality that I have better access to and familiarity with certain parts of UAE society. The limitations include working with assumptions that my research is necessarily more biased than that of non-citizens, dealing with a sense of alienation of writing from that position, and navigating specific concerns (self-censorship) that other academics writing about the region may not have to consider in the same way.” —Rana AlMutawa, Everyday Life in the Spectacular City, page 31.
I can relate to this experience of self-censorship which I often engage in while writing my newsletter and in my creative work as a poet. I have often found that people who grew up with comparatively more freedom of speech can take this for granted and I find that friends and professional networks would forget my boundaries around discussing certain topics online with me even after I repeat them multiple times as it is not part of their everyday “normal.”
When I live in a place where I must practice self-censorship (whether during my time living in the US as a Middle Eastern Muslim person or while currently living in the UAE where I was born and raised), I find that it has an impact on my sense of belonging. This is because part of belonging to me involves my ability to feel that I have a voice to contribute to my community.
At the same time, as AlMutawa observed in her ethnography, experiencing belonging versus exclusion does not always happen as a black and white binary. Rather people can experience what she described as “ambivalent belonging” in which one person can experience exclusion in certain areas and a sense of belonging in other areas. This reflects how I experienced both Dubai and Boston. So while the limited freedom of speech is one exclusionary aspect, there are other aspects of both cities that I still feel connected to.
A question for readers before I continue, feel free to respond by either replying privately on email or clicking on the button below to post a public Substack comment…
If you can relate to the above experience, how do you navigate self-censorship in a way that honors both your safety and what you have to offer? What helps you decide when you can take a risk versus when you can’t?
While I was to some extent aware of orientalist perspectives that can at times color valid criticisms of Dubai, I appreciated that the book had me think of more examples of how this can show up that I did not realize I myself was engaging in even though I am local to the city and grew up here. An example of this is where AlMutawa mentions the “fetishization of poverty” that can unintentionally show up when describing old parts of the city as more “authentic” than new developments. Here is a quote on this that stood out to me in page 54:
“While they dismiss other forms of mass consumption, some seekers of authenticity can be voyeuristic, looking to consume images of poverty, struggle, or ‘tradition.’ In doing so, certain places and people are fetishized in the process. For example, a film director says: ‘I kept looking for an authentic aspect of Dubai until I found this old souk. Amazing people with beautiful stories, finally.’ Here, a souq is depicted as an authentic aspect of Dubai, perhaps due to Orientalist ideas that imagine “traditional” spaces as constituting authenticity in an Arab country. But there is also a class aspect to this discussion, wherein low-income inhabitants are exoticized as more ‘real’ than other people, making those how recognize their realness more ‘real’ as well.”—Rana AlMutawa, Everyday Life in the Spectacular City, page 54
Another quote from page 55 also spoke to me:
“At times, the line between fetishizing poverty or ‘humbleness’ and seeking a less-controlled urbanity is blurred.”—Rana AlMutawa, Everyday Life in the Spectacular City, page 55.
I grew up in an old part of Dubai nearby the Dubai Creek and Al Bastakiya (now called Al Fahidi) so I have often associated such spaces with “home.” I would not feel at “home” unless I visit them which is why I experienced a sense of loss when I noticed how much parts of them changed. However, unlike some of AlMutawa’s respondents who “outgrew” such spaces because of class aspirations despite them missing those spaces, for me I am finding those spaces less accessible due to distance and traffic after my family moved to a different part of Dubai in 2009. I do still visit time to time to feel grounded but not as often as I would like as they are not on my way to things. I also notice my heart open when I see older buildings in other parts of the city or country as they remind me of the neighborhood I grew up in.
Thinking of this and the above two passages from the book has me wonder what is the line between a voyeuristic fetishization of poverty and tradition versus seeking to reconnect with a sense of home one grew up with?
Before I continue, I am curious to hear from readers how they would respond to my above question, so please reply privately to this email or post a public comment by clicking the button below!
One common assumption held by academics writing about Dubai that AlMutuwa critiques is the idea that people are either always passive recipients of how the city develops or active resistors of it. What often gets missed in this binary assumption is the way people make meaning of the developments that can be shaped by their intersecting identities based on gender, age, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, among others.
A point she repeats in her book is the concept of “adaptive agency” where people are neither resisting nor agreeing with how the city is developing but instead find ways to live in it that meets their needs to belong. For example, while a shopping mall is an inherently exclusionary space by class and focuses on consumeristic behavior as a way to connect, people can form meaningful memories in these spaces or even use them in traditional ways as she noted in the example of Emiratis treating certain Emirati dominant cafes the same way they would treat a “majlis” (a traditional gathering space).
One of my critiques of the book is that it does not fully unpack or deconstruct what does “belonging” even mean and how do her respondents understand this. This is a common construct I find often taken for granted by social scientists across different fields in which they assume that readers will have the same shared understanding of what belonging means.
While AlMutawa acknowledges the fact that her respondents are dominantly middle and upper middle income, I wonder how her conclusions would have been different had her research included currently lower income respondents. The chapter about Satwa, a low income neighborhood in Dubai that experienced gentrification, was a particularly interesting one to me.
Many of Satwa’s long-term residents moved either voluntarily or involuntarily and were compensated by the government to make way for new developments. Parts of Satwa still remain but the demographics have shifted. While here too most of her respondents were currently middle income, they had experienced an upward shift in social and economic status. But it was interesting to see how their form of “ambivalent belonging” had more tinges of loss compared to the other respondents she interviewed. This had me wonder who has more access to “adaptive agency” that she described versus who may find it more challenging to access.
These respondents who grew up in Satwa both longed for the deep sense of community at a neighborhood level that they used to feel there while also believing that “progress” is inevitable. This had me wonder whether their response would have been different if they could access another vision of “progress;” one that did not involve displacing them but rather improving their neighborhood’s economic condition and safety while preserving the positive aspects. One of her respondents, Abdulrazzaq, in page 202 and 203 confirms my point.
AlMutawa observed that when people’s material needs were met through their change of economic status, their sense of neighborliness decreased. For example, her respondents mentioned how much they missed the informality of walking into each other’s homes to share food or carpooled together but this stopped when they had enough food for themselves or when everyone had their own private cars.
Furthermore, she mentions research in other Gulf countries that showed how when state welfare and higher standards of living were provided, these made the community dependent on the state and no longer needing to depend on each other. While families and friends may still look out for each other, it is becoming rarer for care at a neighborhood-level to take place.
These points have me wonder how can we encourage people to continue practicing community care even when their material needs are met?
I would love to read reader’s answers to my question above. Please reply privately to this email or publicly on Substack by clicking on the button below!
If you have not already, you may get a copy of the book via the following ways:
If you are located in Dubai, you may buy a physical copy in Art Jameel’s shop. I am not sure if they have a copy you can borrow at their library but you can ask their front desk. While ramps for wheelchairs are available, the doors are not wheelchair friendly. Click here to find information on how to get to Art Jameel.
Click here to search for the nearest public library that carries a copy you can borrow wherever you are in the world.
Click here to buy an e-book copy while supporting global literacy.
Click here to buy a physical copy while supporting local bookshops globally:
Next month’s newsletter will reflect on my experiences with an online introductory 3-week course I will be taking on Insight Dialogue, a relational form of meditation. I will be reflecting on it as a belonging practice. Click here to learn more about Insight Dialogue.
Before I wrap up…
I am ending each of my posts with a randomly drawn conversational card that you can consider using to deepen your conversations with people this week. So here’s today’s card drawn from a deck called Scenario Cards:
“What if you could time travel to any period in the past or future? What period would you travel to?”
Let me know if you end up using this question in any of your conversations and how it goes!
Click the link here to learn more about Scenario Cards. I currently earn an affiliate fee for every purchase from this link. This is so far the first affiliate partnership I have and I only plan to do so with products I genuinely benefited from. I had previously written a post about conversational cards in general prior to being invited to Scenario Cards’ affiliate program. Click here for the link to the post.
I believe that the concept of "Belonging" is a subset of identity. In our region, we are clearly experiencing an identity crisis across various domains, including religion, politics, and history. Addressing these chronic conflicts might begin with the introduction of the concept of renewal ( Tajdeed ). Renewal involves more than just overcoming the past and heritage , akin to change; it also seeks to preserve and revitalize the past. It is not merely about alteration but includes a dimension that respects and rejuvenates our heritage ( linguistically it has these two opposite significations ). In other words, renewal can be understood as a dialectical process, in the Hegelian sense, where change and preservation combined .and whereby we kill the past and yet resurrect it
It’s good to see you back Reema 👋
I love this scenario question. Although, considering any period of history that felt like it would be fun to time travel back to had me thinking I would not want to be a woman then! This still applies but I think I would like to time travel back to the 1950s and 60s as a teenager in the UK or US with the advent of rock’n’roll music, and the Beatles etc and how exciting it would have been to have been part of all that. 🎶
How about you?