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Comment

Freedom of Belief

Islam

Middle East

7 March 2024

7 min read

Beyond the glitz: the Gulf States and belief

Religious tolerance amid the skyscrapers.

Andrew Thompson

Andrew Thompson MBE is an Anglican priest who served in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

A large, modern cubiod building with a series of thin external pillars is seen from low down against a sunny blue sky

St Francis Church, Dubai.

Abrahamic Family House.

The Arabian Gulf conjures up images of sandy deserts, oil and gas and robed Arab sheikhs. Western (orientalist) academic imagination portrays the tribal culture of the Arab as rooted in a timeless Islamic world, one which suggests an atavistic conservatism which imposes severe restrictions on women and people of other faiths.

The reality, however, in a country like the United Arab Emirates is utterly different. This is a country which has more women in the government cabinet than any other country in the world. Emirati women hold more PhDs than their male compatriots. The UAE government has a Minister for Artificial Intelligence, a Minister for Coexistence and Tolerance, and (my favourite) a Minister for the Future. They examine the emergence and use of new technologies which would enhance human existence. A good example is Masdar city, a whole residential area which is built from the ground up to run on sustainable and renewable energy. The paradox of using oil and gas revenues to invest in future forms of renewable energy is one of many. This is a Gulf country which has wholeheartedly embraced living for the future; yet at the same time, they have held onto the ancient Islamic faith as a vehicle which carries their values in the here and now.

A visitor to Dubai can only marvel at the speed at which the city has morphed from a sleepy backwater just one generation ago, to being one of the world’s leading cities and tourist destinations. In the last 12 months, 17 million tourists visited Dubai alone.

Even more impressive is the Gulf’s use of ‘soft’ power in which they use the wealth of the oil industry in projecting Arab influence in spheres ranging from space exploration and sport. We have witnessed Gulf states hosting world cups, mixed martial arts tournaments, and Formula One through to the performing arts including opera, musicals (Hamilton is currently playing there) and K Pop.

In the current crisis between Hamas and the Israeli government we have seen Qatar come to prominence as peace negotiators and the lobbyists of countries locked into the Abrahamic Accord - a groundbreaking peace deal between Israel and Gulf States ending decades long diplomatic détente. That Saudi Arabia are offering to join the Abrahamic Accord if Israel commits to the two-state solution signals a shift in Middle Eastern politics which is unprecedented in the region’s history.

Amid these developments is the presence of a large, international and flourishing church community. There has been little written about the religious space in the Arabian Gulf; much of the attention has been focused on the oil industry and the resulting politics. Yet, there are many Christian communities in the region. The Christian church in the Gulf has recently been visited by Pope Francis. The papal visits are the first ever in the region. The first one in 2019 witnessed a staggering 180,000 worshippers attending a mass in a football stadium provided by the president of the UAE. This was followed by a trip to Iraq and then to Bahrain.

The discourse regarding tolerance has become a feature of soft diplomacy across the Arabian Gulf, with numerous interfaith initiatives receiving government backing. The UAE is leading the way with the construction of the first purpose built Gurudwara, a Hindu Temple and a much-celebrated Abrahamic Family House; a single campus which hosts a mosque, church and a synagogue (also the first to be built in the region).

At a time when Islamophobia and Antisemitism are escalating, Muslims in the West are feeling the need to retreat from the public space to feel safe. Ancient hostile narratives are being resurrected to paint the Islamic community as an alien enemy whose values are antithetical to Western ones. This was seen most recently during the World Football tournament in Qatar where the Western media relentlessly pushed stories which distorted and misled their audience on Arab culture and context. For example, the figures of high death rates reported by the media, of Nepali workers building football stadiums neglected to mention that these statistics included the deaths of all expatriates of all nationalities resident in the country, and that most of the deaths reported were due to natural causes (heart attack and cancer), road traffic accidents and so on. Another story implied that there was no alcohol permitted in the country and everyone had to go ‘dry’. This was patently false as fans who visited the country can attest to. Alcohol was available and accessible to those who wanted it. These negative reports reinforced existing prejudices against the Muslim Arabs. I would like to counteract some of this hostility based on my experience of living in the Arabian Gulf over several years as an Anglican priest.

A fourth century letter from a bishop who was dealing with the issue of whether Christian pearl divers should work on a Sunday.

Christianity in the Arabian Gulf predates Islam. Churches and monasteries functioned on the trading routes from Baghdad, travelling along the South-eastern coastline all the way through to Oman. Many of the prominent tribes in northern and eastern Arabia were Christians.

These ancient Christian communities had a seminary, several bishoprics and prominent theologians who produced commentaries and liturgies still in use today. They were involved in several trades, including the pearling industry. A fourth century letter from a bishop who was dealing with the issue of whether Christian pearl divers should work on a Sunday; left it to the individual conscience of the pearl diving community.

It was trade, not persecution, which was the main factor leading to the decline of the church by the ninth century. By then Islam had coexisted with the Christians peacefully for at least 200 years. The archaeological sites of churches in the Gulf today show no sign of violence and destruction, rather, their building materials were used to build nearby homes long after the monks had left.

It is sobering to discover that some of the worst religious encounters in terms of violence and intolerance in the region, came not from the Islamic communities but rather the militant western Christian powers who were expanding their empires to the East. First came the Portuguese who were vicious in the use of the mutilation of noses and ears as a tool to subjugate Arab tribes. This was followed by the British and the assertive use of gun boat diplomacy. To this day the residents of Ras Al Khaimah in the northern emirates recount their town being shelled by the British Royal Navy in the late 1800s.

The pages of the Gospel often come to life to me when I visit a Muslim home and I recognize similar patterns of culture.

Given this negative history, it is astonishing that the culture of tolerance prevailed towards non-Muslims in the coastal cities of Arabia. Today in the UAE, over forty centres of Christian worship offer a spiritual home to close to nine per cent of the population. Though not quite to the same extent, other Gulf countries have similar provisions of hospitality for the Christian community. Saudi Arabia, long regarded as the most intolerant of the Arab states, is including church buildings in their ambitious project The Line.

The gift that the Arabian Gulf offers is a model in which diverse neighbours can learn to encounter each other in a space in which is neutral and rewarding. My own faith as a Christian has been deeply enhanced by learning about and experiencing Islamic spirituality and hospitality. It astonishes me how few take up that opportunity, despite being many years in the region.

The Arabian Islamic culture echoes and at times has preserved the culture that would have been familiar to Jesus Christ. The pages of the Gospel often come to life to me when I visit a Muslim home and I recognize similar patterns of culture, I am reminded that Jesus was a child of the Middle East.

One project the church in the UAE initiated was to make local employment laws available to workers in their native languages.

Western media often highlights negative stories from the Arabian Gulf regions. Human rights issues and migrant labour abuse are some of the common issues. Without diminishing the real suffering of victims in these stories, the reality is that these are global issues.

The UK witnessed multiple deaths of the Chinese cockle pickers in Blackpool; in addition, migrants in the UK can recite a long list of unjust hostile actions taken against them by the British Home Office.

The Gulf has modified their laws to criminalise abuse of labourers and domestic workers, although critics point out that the laws are not consistently enforced. One project the church in the UAE initiated was to make local employment laws available to workers in their native languages, both in writing and on an audio device.

This then is the alternative narrative. The Arabian Gulf, at its best, can model interfaith and intercultural encounters in a way which promotes a safe and cohesive society. Islam, at its best, can provide a counterpoint in the religious landscape in which non-Muslims can worship without fear.

An antidote to the ‘Arab-bashing’ which seems to prevail in the West is to move away from promoting hostile narratives and instead, in the words of Paul in the New Testament, to seek that which is true, honourable, pure, lovely and excellent.

Article

Books

Comment

Community

15 October 2024

6 min read

The elegies that fail the forgotten places

Storytelling’s not about giving people a voice, it's about listening to what they’re singing.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A book's front cover beside a portrait of the author, JD Vance

J.D. Vance book promotion, 2017.

Does it matter who tells the story of a place? It’s a question I’ve sat with as a writer, a community worker, and as someone who returned to my native West Country after a long time away. My departure and return to this place brought with it a sharper awareness of the labels this rural region could invite; of the way its people could be portrayed; of how easily they can be reduced to a one-dimensional stereotype that fosters little understanding.

And I am both reducer and reduced. I am a proud Devonian, rooted in soil thick with my ancestors, whilst also craving the culture and variety of elsewhere. My story of life in this place is complex. It’s a story that’s mine to tell, and not representative of anyone else from here – just as the people I’ve worked with in communities here and across sub-Saharan Africa taught me too: this person is not this place. This story is not this people.

Stories matter – stories told; stories hidden. They shape our identity, our opinions, our possibilities. John Steinbeck wrote that:

“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, some strain the story through their mesh of prejudice…”

Stories told reflect stories carried, like light refracted through a prism. A story’s colours tell us something about who tells the story and how they see the world. Which is one reason perhaps that JD Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis came under scrutiny, especially since he was named Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in the forthcoming US election.

Hillbilly Elegy tells the story of Vance’s white working-class family, from his grandparents in the Appalachia region of Kentucky to his own coming of age in Middletown, Ohio. Vance raises questions about how local people, including his own family, are responsible for their own misfortunes, including poverty and addiction. His book came out in 2016, at just the right time to give many Americans an insight into why so many people like Vance’s relatives and past neighbours had voted for Donald Trump. It was painted as the voice of a forgotten community, and it became a bestseller, admired by some for its portrayal of Appalachian culture by someone from the inside. But reading people who know the places he talks of, it becomes clear that the book is “rife with stereotypes and classic Republican talking points peddled under the guise of lived experience,” as one commentator said.

Sarah Smarsh, author of books including Bone on Bone: Essays in America by a Daughter of the Working Class, said in a Guardian piece published in 2016,

“that the media industry ignored my home for so long and left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.”

A Bitter Southerner article responding to Hillbilly Elegy said that generalisation means that “…complexity gets simplified, the edges get rounded out[…]Appalachia has been written about and photographed in such a compelling (if fabricated) way that the descriptions of passersby took on more weight than the lived experiences of the people being described. What remains is a concept of a place that is both wildly romantic in its natural beauty and backward enough to justify the destruction of that very nature.”

We live in divided times, but often I find it hard to discern real division versus the media-created story of division. Theirs is a story that gets things wrong. Smarsh reflects how “countless images of working-class progressives…are rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll. This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America…” This is why it matters that we hear stories that do not fit that paradigm. A many-voiced 2019 publication Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy offered some of those stories in response to Vance’s painting of Appalachia.

Vance thought he could write the story of a 13-state region, but many Appalachians were unhappy about him becoming their spokesperson, especially when he seemed to blame the poor for their poverty. Appalachian Reckoning is a graceful counter to this: not silencing Vance’s own story but offering many more views and stories from Appalachia. Its co-editor Meredith McCarroll said she wanted to “complicate any singular view simply by including multiple ones. I wanted to create a chorus of voices, “each singing what belongs to him or her and to no one else,” to borrow from Walt Whitman’s view of place.” The publication offers cultural nuance, emotional connection, and a “context for some of the claims Vance makes in his book when it moves beyond memoir, and to pass the mic to a wider range of writers, poets, photographers, activists, and artists who make Appalachia a place far too complex to capture and far too dynamic to die.”

This approach feels important now, in the world as is it, with a media that often overlooks nuance, and with a culture that has become so visual that the way things are styled and framed and presented to us online can often be quite different to the reality. It is important to know the difference, and stories can help us discern that.

This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear.

There are stories that are easy to peddle and easy to buy into. In charity work, I saw how the story of the benevolent professional outsider could shape things, leaving little room for local stories and experience. In politics I saw how the story of opposition got in the way of all the people getting on with the everyday work of restoring and caring for their communities across lines of difference. We can, unknowingly, make a place and a people shrink or even disappear with the stories we carry or amplify, or ignore.

Stories wielded unwisely can shrink faith as well as people and places. The Jesus who I did not grow up with but came to know slowly as an adult is a Jesus of nuance, compassion, and deep listening. He would not, I think, recognise the brand of Christianity that can be used to justify particular politics. That religion and politics have in places become so intertwined is perhaps a reflection of the reduction of the vastness of the Bible and the many diverse voices it contains into one story that serves a particular group of people. Jesus again and again subverted what empire and hierarchy and tradition expected of him. He invited people into his story over and over, curious about their own story but never using it as a reason to include or exclude.

When I think about who tells the story of a place – or of a people, a time, a faith – I see that really, there is never one story anyway. There is a chorus of voices, each a little different, each part of a vast harmony that – if we have the ears and heart to hear it – sings a song of challenge and joy, of despair and illumination. Former US president Woodrow Wilson said, “the ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people”. Storytelling is not about giving people a voice – something I heard a lot in charity work. It is about listening to what they’re already singing. This symphony of existence can, if we give each voice its space, subvert paradigms of division and fear, of biased framing and selective storytelling. It can sing us back to ourselves, helping us see each other. And isn’t that what softens hearts, isn’t that why we tell stories? Author Kazuo said in his Nobel acceptance speech that “stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” Stories are not tools of manipulation or power, but pathways to encounter, to relationship, to understanding. They are, perhaps, the only way through divided times.