ISO 26000 en la pyme

We have seen in the previous section the sudden transition that Kuwait had undergone during the second half of the 20th century. By 1990, the population of Kuwait had rocketed to 2,100,000 (from 206,000 in 1957), i.e. a tenfold increase in only 33 years (Ibrāhīm 2009: 147). According to Hill (1969: 84), two factors are responsible for this very large growth: heavy immigration and a high rate of natural population increase. Moreover, Khouja and Sadler (1979: 37) have observed that from 1961 onwards, this phenomenal growth was due to two main developments:

1. The influx of workers from other countries in the region to help in the construction of new infrastructure projects and staff jobs created by the expansion of public services. 2. The increase in the number of Kuwaitis through a concerted effort to naturalise tribesmen

scattered on the fringes of the country along with a limited number of qualified people who had resided in the country for an extended time (normally twenty years or more).

If the Gulf War had not occurred, the population is likely to have increased progressively. Actually, when Kuwait was invaded in 1990, the sight of thousands of Indians, East Asians, Westerners, and non-Kuwaiti Arabs trapped under occupation or fleeing ‘made the outside world suddenly aware of a singular fact of Kuwaiti society–that Kuwaitis are an absolute minority in their own country’ (Longva 1997: 266). This poses the following question then: Who are the Kuwaitis and how could they be socially classified? Their history as a nation goes back not much more than two hundred years, but their roots as a people stretch back over countless centuries (Sapsted 1980: 6). What is really important to argue about is why the urban-Bedouin division has such an important place in the popular discourse of Kuwait. I shall attempt to explore these questions in the following paragraphs, albeit briefly.

The Middle East as a cultural area has three major ‘culture types’: pastoral, rural, and urban (Cadora 1970: 10). The population of Kuwait can be divided into two communities: immigrants (‘non-Kuwaitis’) and muwāṭinīn (sing. muwāṭin) ‘citizens of Kuwait’ (‘Kuwaitis’); the former group is locally known by three epithets: ağānib (sing. ağnabi) ‘foreigners’, wāfidīn (sing. wāfid) ‘expatriates’, or mu īmīn (sing. mu īm) ‘non-citizens’.32

Non-Kuwaitis are further subdivided into two communities: Arabs and non-Arabs,33 which are discussed in section 5.3.1.2 below. According to Dickson (1949: 108), Kuwaiti Arabs divide themselves into two main groups: al-ḥaḍar and al-bādiya. Al-ḥaḍar (singular ḥaḍari), or settled communities, are those who dwell in permanent stone or mud houses, i.e. townsfolk or villagers; al-bādiya, or ‘pastoral nomads’, are those who live nomad lives, own camels and live in black hair-tents (byūt šaʿa ).34 Though the scene is different today, more and more nomads have left their precarious existence in the desert for permanent homes in the cities (Frazer 1969: 657). In fact, ‘nearly 99 percent of the country’s population is settled, and Kuwait hardly contains any Bedouin who practice a nomadic or pastoral lifestyle’ (al-Nakib 2014: 6).

As far as one can observe, the major social and linguistic division in Arabic-speaking Kuwait is that between ḥaḍar and the Bedouin communities, from the point of view of phonology and morphology, and less of lexicology. ‘These are usually referred to in the literature as the badawī or ‘Bedouin’ (B) type, and the ḥaḍa ī or ‘sedentary’ (S) type’ (Holes 2007a: 212). Holes (2006b: 25) argues that the ‘sedentary’ dialect type, which is ancient, ‘was once probably more widespread than it is now, having gradually been replaced by the ‘Bedouin’ type over at least the last 1000 years’.35

In local taxonomy, the ʿArab or pure desert Bedouin roughly divide themselves into two tribal classes: Sharīf or superior (aristocratic) tribes, and non-Sharīf or inferior tribes.36

32 _{According to Dresch (2005: 25), ‘[t]here are commonly reckoned three circles of identity in Gulf}

society beyond that of muwāṭin or fellow citizen: halījī or Gulf, then Arab, then ajnabī or foreign’.

33 _{A third dichotomy, Muslims and non-Muslims, is discussed in Longva (1997: 56-59).} 34

In Arabic, al-bādiya means ‘the nomad-inhabited desert’; al-badu or al-bduwi (feminine al-bduwiyya) ‘the desert-dwelling nomad’, whom in English is called the Bedouin. The nomad naturally does not refer to himself as a Bedouin, but rightly styles himself an ʿArab (Dickson 1949: 27). As one of the Bedouin social systems, Dickson (1949: 108, 662) also notes the so-called ʿArabdar group; an ʿArab who is half Bedouin and half townsman, which does seem to hold in present-day Kuwait, at least amongst the urbanites.

35 _{In Arabic dialectological studies, ‘the labels ‘Bedouin’ and ‘Sedentary’ are not used to classify the}

speakers of the dialects according to their lifestyle, but according to the provenance of their dialects. By convention, those dialects that originated during the second stage are called ‘Bedouin’, those that emerged at the first stage are called ‘Sedentary’. These are diachronic labels corresponding to what is now known about the historical layering of the Arabicization process’ (Versteegh 2011: 543).

Historically, the former are known to be pure in blood and origin (i.e. aṣīlīn) and claim descent from the Patriarchs Ishmael and Qaḥṭān. The latter are not aṣīlīn (Dickson 1949: 111; al-Sʿaydān 1970: 88).37 Within this social system, I may add the widespread notions of ḥamūla38

and baysiri (pl. baysiriyya); the former is ‘a group of families that trace descent back five or seven generations to a common ancestor’ and the latter is said to be derived from Persian, meaning ‘without a head’ and designates ‘a group of families that trace descent to nobody or that of unknown descent and origin and sometimes applied to non-Arabs in general’ (al-Sʿaydān 1970: 249; al-Ayyoub 1982: 145-147).39

With respect to the permanent populations of Kuwait, Dickson (1956: 40) observes that the great majority are Arabs of the ʿUtūb, ʿAwāzim, ashāyda, Banī Khālid, ʿAjmān, ʿAniza, and Ḍhafīr tribes, besides Ḥasāwiyyah, or Arabs from al-Ḥasa, and Baḥārnah.40

Al-Sʿaydān (1972: 1164) adds the following major tribes of Kuwait: Duwāsir, Sibʿān, Šammar, Faḍūl, Suhūl, Gaḥṭān,41

as well as ʿAdāwīn, and Hawājir. The tribes of the longest standing would seem to be the non-Sharīf tribes of ʿAwāzim and ashāyda ‘whose dialect is in many ways very close to that of the settled population’ (Ingham 1982a: 12, 73).42

Let us go back to my enquiry regarding the urban-Bedouin dichotomy. It is absolutely crucial to distinguish between the ḥaḍar ‘urban’ and the badu ‘Bedouin, rural’ communities because this dichotomy carries implications for dialect variation and change in the area. Longva (2006: 172) rightly distinguishes the urban-Bedouin dichotomy as follows,

In present-day popular speech, the term hadhar designates Kuwaitis whose forefathers lived in Kuwait before the launch of the oil era (1946) and worked as traders, sailors, fishermen, and pearl divers. In contrast, the term badu designates a specific group of newcomers: these are immigrants, mostly from Saudi Arabia, who used to live on animal pastoralism; they moved to Kuwait between 1960 and 1980, after Kuwait had become an independent, oil exporting nation, and have been granted Kuwaiti nationality over the years since then.

37 _{Today, the concept of aṣīl and non-aṣīl is being applied to a breed of horse that originated in the}

Arabian Peninsula.

38 _{Also known as ayāwīd ‘nobly (tribally) descended communities.’}

39 _{Longva (2006: 182) observes that ‘Kuwaitis under forty years of age, regardless of their social}

background, have no or very limited knowledge of tribes, tribal history, and tribal organisation’.

40

According to Dickson (1956: 41), the leading families in Kuwait, in order of number of living males, are as follows: Jnāʿāt (Qināʿāt, Suhūl Arabs), Āl Khālid, Āl Zāyid (Āl Ghānim), Āl Saif (including Ibn oumī and Āl Shamlān), Āl Bader, Āl Jalīl, Āl Ṣāliḥ, and Āl Ṣaqir. See also al-Qināʿī (1987: 67) and Abu-Hakima (1988: 57).

41 _{Clark (1980: 499) argues that the most important subtribes in the area were the Āl Khalīfa, the}

Jalāhmah, and the Āl Ṣubāḥ. ‘The ʿAwāzim and ashāyda, Ḍhafīr and Muṭair tribes either had their tribal headquarters in this locality or utilised water holes and pastures. The ʿAwāzim tribe were particularly important in fishing off the coast, an occupation that was combined with nomadic herding’.

42

A map of general locations of tribes in the Arabian Peninsula can be found in Dickson (1949), Lebkicher et al. (1960: 62), Kochwasser (1969: 145), al-Sʿaydān (1972: 1163-1164), and Clark (1980: 489). See also Clark (1980: 495-497) and Meinke (1985: 62) for the major tribal groups of Kuwait.

With respect to the notion of aṣīlīn and non-aṣīlīn (‘original vs. non-original’) amongst the families of Kuwait, Longva (2005: 121, 2006: 174) notes that the Nationality Law of 1959 differentiates between two social groups: wētiyyīn bil-aṣil ‘Kuwaitis by origin’ or wētiyyīn bit-taʾsīs ‘Kuwaitis who carry ğinsiyyaʾūla (‘first-level citizenship’) and wētiyyīn bit-tağnīs ‘Kuwaitis by naturalisation’ (i.e. ‘newcomers’).43

So it is a matter of ‘purity of origin’ rather than simply ‘origin’. In his social description of the Kuwaiti dialect, Holes (2007c: 608-609) has made this distinction nicely:

There is a sharp social distinction between Kuwaitis who have full citizenship, including the right to vote (if male over 21)44 – urban, mainly mercantile, and descended from the Najdi tribes that arrived in the area from the mid-18th century – and other Kuwaitis, mostly recently sedentarised Bedouin who roamed the borderlands of Iraq and Saudi Arabia until the early 1950s, who have a lesser form of citizenship. There is an even sharper distinction between Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis, with certain residential areas of Kuwait City being reserved for Kuwaiti nationals only.

Kuwait’s population is highly concentrated in the capital, Kuwait City. Longva (2006) demonstrates that Kuwait is a society that is divided into two sections: an outlying rural area and a central urban core, both of which are inhabited by two socially distinct classes, the ḥaḍar and the Bedouin.45

Moreover, it has been argued that the distribution of the population is characterised by two related trends (Mitchell 1980: 591; ʿAzīz and al-Moosa 1981: 129-147). In many areas, citizens and immigrants live apart from one another (Ḥawalli is the extreme example). Also, Kuwaitis have become suburban while non-Kuwaitis reside in the inner city and the older, less planned and more crowded suburbs.46

As roads are the lifeline of a nation, Kuwait attaches special attention to its roads, which are designed to meet the pressures of urbanisation and the great increase in traffic. After the

43 _{The category of naturalised Kuwaitis includes Shīʿa (from Southern Iraq and al-Ḥasa, and mostly from}

Iran), a few Sunnī (Ḥwala) Arabs from Iran and other countries in the Middle East, and some Christian Arabs from Palestine and Southern Iraq (Longva 2006: 174-5). Al-Nakib (2014: 12) adds, [w]hile members of the two categories held equal rights to employment, land ownership, and welfare benefits, naturalized citizens could not vote or run for parliament until thirty years after their naturalization’.

44 _{In May 2005, the Kuwaiti parliament granted female suffrage. Four years later, four female candidates}

won parliamentary seats in a general election.

45 _{There is a presence of the so-called ‘stateless’, popularly known in Kuwait as the bidūns (from bidūn}

ğinsiyya ‘without nationality’). The bidūns fell neither under the category of Kuwaitis nor under that of non- Kuwaitis in the sense of expatriates, i.e. nationals of other countries with temporary residence in Kuwait (Longva 1997: 50). Many bidūn were Bedouin, belonging especially to the Šammar and ʿAniza tribes (Crystal 2005: 175). Al-Nakib (2014: 13), however, observes the misconception in present-day Kuwait whereby the bidūn people who came from Syria, Jordan, and Iraq ‘destroyed their original nationality papers’.

46 _{Al-Moosa and McLachlan (1985: 29) report that the main areas inhabited by immigrants are Ḥawallī,}

roads in Kuwait having been divided into seven ring roads, the distinction between the ḥaḍar and the Bedouin has become surprisingly clear-cut as Longva (2006: 175) points out:

The concrete dividing line between the two social worlds is generally considered to be the Sixth Ringroad [...]. Between the First and the Fifth ings lie the undisputedly ‘hadhar’ neighborhoods. The area between the Fifth and the Sixth Rings is a zone of transition with a mixed population of hadhar, badu, and foreign migrants. The area south of the Sixth Ringroad was, until recently, ‘badu territory’. It must be emphasised that the term ḥ i i ‘ḥaḍari’ ‘is part of the traditional Bedouin vocabulary’ (Dickson 1956: 594). Longva (2006: 176) reports that the term ‘ḥaḍar’ is not used as a self-reference term among urban Kuwaitis. However, the phrase ahl s-sū ‘the people from within the wall’ is sometimes used by the citizens of Kuwait when they emphasise their collective identity as against the Bedouin in line with the wall that bordered Kuwait Town in the past. Even though the wall was knocked down in the 1950s, it ‘is still a powerful trope in the discursive construction of hadhar identity (ibid.)’.