AHMAD MAKIA         🛒   📖   🔭   📺   📚    HYPERHOUSE



Treading 
Gulf Waters




by Ahmad Makia
for Ibraaz
2016
 



Xanith is usually Arabic slang for males with effeminate characteristics. It derives from the Classical Arabic word mukhanath – mukhannathun in plural – for a range of non-heteronormative sexual identities such as transgender, intersex, or eunuch. The earliest records of the mukhanath are found in Islamic hadiths where they are referred to as unique men who resemble women in voice, features, and gait, and ‘freed’ from sexual needs (1). Islamic judgment decrees that, since xanith has ‘inherited’ these innate qualities, they are not guilty of their practices, but immoral if they choose to be (2). In effect, the practice of sodomy is prohibited in Islam, but queer masculine expression is acknowledged and negotiated. As an example, in contemporary Oman, the oldest independent state in the Arab world, xanith is granted some state legitimacy: accepted, frowned-upon, pitied, but not celebrated. In many ways, the culture is an open secret of sorts. Similar to the Islamic-sanctioned ‘informality’ with the mukhannath, in Oman, xanith is nation-state sanctioned ‘informality’. 


Today, xanith is understood to be an exclusively male-to-female enterprise. The Western ethnography of xanith was created by Unni Wikan, a Norwegian anthropologist, who conducted fieldwork in Oman, and then published Man Becomes Woman: Transsexualism in Oman as a Key to Gender Roles in 1977 (3). Most of the legitimized literature on xanith emerged after Wikan’s published research, which pigeonholed xanith as indigenous to Oman and the Arabian Peninsula.







In her study, Wikan outlined the way Oman’s genders were stylistically distinguished at the time. She observed that men generally wear white tunics, women ‘wear patterned cloth in bright colours’, while xaniths wear a solid coloured tunic, normally in pastel colours (4). Men have short hair; women keep theirs long; and xaniths grow theirs somewhere between these two lengths. While men comb their hair ‘backward away from the face’ and women comb theirs ‘forward from a central parting’, Wikan observed, xaniths comb theirs ‘diagonally forward from a side parting’, oiling it heavily in a style closer to that of the women (5). Xaniths wear vibrant make-up, dishdashas slightly tighter at the waist, and a cloud of oud. 

They participate in social structures relegated to women, such as entering the bride’s chamber before she is unveiled, singing with women during the wedding celebration, and eating with them. As Wikan concluded, it is ‘behaviour, and not anatomy’ that forms ‘the basis for the Omani conceptualisation of gender identity.’ (6) This statement was responded to with fierce criticism as many academics claimed that Wikan’s research was inspired by older colonial ethnographic thought, and negligent of the economic circumstances that shape xaniths social role.

According to Wikan, xanith is traditionally a domestic servant, homosexual sex-worker, or both. Occupying a third gender space, xaniths perform sexual favours for men, typically occupying a submissive role in the exchange. Yet, despite embodying the role of a woman, xanith can also be released from her ‘duties’ so as to convert back to a ‘man’ upon proof of consummation with a chosen bride, making her no longer a xanith (7). Similarly, once xanith has entered old age, they are drawn back into the domain of men, albeit tenuously (8).











Since Wikan’s study in 1977, the body of xanith has become a fashionable figure, along with hijras of the subcontinent, in the North Atlantic discourse regarding non-White conceptions of gender and sexuality. Yet, Western scholarship on what is considered Eastern sexuality is fraught because the global sexual institution is a fraudulent place, usually disparaging or sensationalizing of individuals who do not fulfill normative gender roles. Unsurprisingly then, Wikan’s research, I find, is not more than an account of the western world peering into the ‘Erotics’ of the east in its own philosophical quest for agitating male - female gender fixities and another example of how westerns look east for role models in cultural masquerade (9).  (See Murray (10), Shepherd (11), Carrier 12).) Contemporary Anglo media, moreover, instrumentalizes xanith, and non-Western gender bending, to complement and sediment the Atlantic view on queer selfhood and gay globalities, which is dismissive of ‘self-technologies’ cultivated in the Asian, Gulf, and Indian Ocean worlds.


Therefore, in this essay, I avoid the literature on xanith in relation to corrective postcolonial identity politics and propose for convergences between sexuality and geography, by examining the complexity of environmental factors and how it informs human agency. My attempt is to draw a wider cartography of sexuality through Indian Ocean maritime relations, specifically governance, masculinity, and architecture, to contextualize the political conditions and affectations that shape xanith’s relation to Oman and the Gulf region. I am interested in creating another vocabulary around xanith communities, not as a critique or subversion of published literature, but to produce critical thought around the Gulf’s human geography.






Most academic literature on xanith identifies the community ethnically: Omani, Arab, or Khaleeji. This is also adopted by British and European colonialists whose records, between the 17-19th centuries, envision homo and trans sexualities, as imports from the lands of the contemporary Omani nation into the Swahili coast, as well as some parts of South Asia. These records posit that ‘perverted’ sexual practices belong to an identifiable peoples that was later introduced to other places through enforced occupation. In Lawrence E. Mbogoni’s book Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History (2012), as an example, the author questions if ‘liwat’, Arabic term for anal intercourse, were already in practice across East Africa or if it were of alien origins introduced via the Omani Empire (13). In other words, xanith, in most literature, comes from Oman, point A, and then arrives to the Swahili coast, point B. 

My concern with this logic is how social and political geographies are perceived to be from the closed, dry, and terrestrial nation without ruminating on how the modern and urban maritime landscape informs and shapes social identities. What is missing from the literature on xanith is the journey across the ocean, and motivation for maritime travel. I contend that this liminal ship journey, and the surfaces and ports it travels on or to, is a geography that offers radical concepts for citizenry, identity and sexuality, pertinent to Oman, the Gulf region, and its connection to the Indian Ocean.










The literature on Omani sexuality prior to Wikan’s research chronicles a range of ‘perverse’ practices found not only within Oman, but in and around the Gulf region at large, from the practice of keeping concubines and pederasty, to homosexuality and relations with xaniths (14).  Most of these accounts come from the Swahili coast, or more officially, the Sultanate of Zanzibar, a spinal stretch from Somalia through to Kenya, up until the northern parts of Mozambique and Madagascar. Oman’s overseas territories also included the Comoros Islands, Socotra, some parts of present day U.A.E., Gwadar, a province in today’s Pakistan, and the southern coast of present-day Iran. 

 This geography corresponds to the territory Oman ruled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the height of the Omani Sultanate, during which time it was a participant in the Indian Ocean slave trade between the Swahili coast and the Arabian Peninsula, trafficking around 50,000 bodies annually (15). At the time, the Sultanate of Oman under the Al Sayd dynasty – who continues to rule over Oman today – was a powerful commercial empire and competed against Portugal and Britain for control over the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf. Today’s Swahili and Lascar identities are the creolization of this ship contact conducted between the 16th-20th centuries in the Indian Ocean.




In 1840, though the sources vary, Oman's capital moved from Muscat to Stone Town of Zanzibar City, Tanzania, on the east coast of Africa (16).  By this time, Said bin Sultan established a ruling Arab elite and ivory and clove plantations laboured by the Black slave population. Oman’s overseas Sultans and their rich allies developed a cash crop economy and encouraged wealthy Indian merchants to resettle in Zanzibar, who today control a substantial percentage of the nation’s wealth (17). 

 One of the most prominent figures of Oman’s rule on the east African coast is Tippu Tip, a Swahili-Zanzibari trader of mixed Arab and African descent whose black features are known to have imbued in him an inferiority complex and a rejection of his physiognomy. Tip identified as a wealthy Arab merchant and punished those who mistook him as an African. Tip led major expeditions into the African interior – reaching as far as the Congo region – to capture slaves that would harvest ivory, carry it back to Zanzibar Town and then be sold into the slave market. He became one of the biggest slave merchants of the Indian Ocean, and was known for being violent when capturing slaves, owning himself around 10,000 bodies (18).


Under Oman’s rule, a variety of sexual relations were introduced into east Africa via the Empire’s presence and domination, as reported in historic European records from Zanzibar and Mombasa, in which xanith appears in little flurries (19). Christopher B. Rigby, as an example, notes that  ‘numbers of sodomites come from Muscat, and these degraded wretches openly walk about dressed in female attire, with veils on their faces.’ (20) Gill Sheperd’s research in Mombasa claims that ‘significant of our understanding of the Swahili, homosexuality is common in the two original areas of the Arab immigrants to East Africa: Saudi Arabia and Oman. Their incorporation into Swahili life was often as superiors – traders, rulers, wealthy settlers – and their attitudes to homosexuality must have been influential.’ (21) In M. Haberlandt’s ethnography of effeminate Black slaves in Zanzibar, he attributes these practices ‘to the influence of Arabs’ who ‘[engage] in sex at an early age, oversaturation occurs soon among these people, and they seek stimulation through contrary acts’, ie relations with xaniths.  (22)





Most of this colonial literature shapes xanith’s belonging to an ethnic-national group and in relation to an authoritative class, who are stereotyped to be from a perverted sexual habitat. I contest the link between the nation and the migrational history of this community. Instead, I find the maritime social network of the Indian Ocean a more meaningful environmental situation for xanith. This is because these records confirm that xanith was part of ship crews and vessel movements in the Indian Ocean. Therefore, I consider xanith’s history in greater relation to ship labor history, than national or imperial history.

The ship, as a historical navigable architecture and device, has developed in complete divergence from the social and religious institutions that existed on land. (23) The physical and psychological limits of the ship as well as its isolation from social attitudes and developments of the ‘land’ characterise marine societies as their own independent, total institutions; or homosexual institutions, more precisely (24). Heterosexuality finds greater meaning in territory, whereas the ship is a novel space, in which expressions of masculine sexuality do not emerge from the scenarios of biopower of religious authority or monolithic imperial institutions.







The fleet is an ‘outside’ technology and it operates from a global perspective by distinguishing itself from the local, and thus cultivates its own attitudes. Usually, practices from the sea spilled onto the land. Colonies, then, did not only become commercial and religious outposts of the coloniser, they absorbed to an extent the social order of marine institutions as well, including pirates, slaves, seamen, immigrants, bonded labor, deserters, tricksters, and others travelling outside the dominion of admirals, merchants, and governorates. The architecture of the ship and the maritime expressions of sexual identity is missing from the literature of not just the social history of xanith, but also the areas they are usually described as from. Therefore, these sexualities become perceived as ‘importations’ because they sit outside the logics of national sedentary civilizations and its overdetermined articulations on gender.



The isolated wooden world of the deep sea invites another kind of frontier and cultural borderland, as usually described in naval literature and imaginarium (25).  In the mainstream, these frontiers are depicted as romantic, emancipated spaces that sit outside regulation; or, pirate space. However, I contend that these water spaces are not surfaces onto which humans project their longings and idealized aspirations, but as an ongoing and continuing surface of global modernity, that has created an amphibious technological zone, lived and occupied by alien-like, bionic humans. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, as an example, the Nantucketer whaler and sailor is not depicted as only a seafarer, but a sea-dweller, and as such appears as almost extraterrestrial. This is especially true since marine societies have historically developed their own languages, social systems, commerce, and sexual identities. Could xanith be extraterrestrial too?





As another example, Sugata Bose's A Hundred Horizons (2006) offers a non-fictive articulation on the forms of belonging found in these aquatic and extraterrestrial borderlands. In this book, Bose maps the interregional arena of the Indian Ocean as a radical space for understanding identity and society. Apart from looking at continental identifications, or national ones, he conceives of shared water rims as places for political and personal affinity (26). He writes:

Regional entities known today as the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, which underpin the rubric of area studies in the Western academy, are relatively recent constructions that arbitrarily project certain legacies of colonial power onto the domain of knowledge in the post-colonial era. The world of the Indian Ocean, or for that matter, that of the Mediterranean, has a much greater depth of economic and cultural meaning. (27)






The Swahili identity, as an example, found across the Persian Gulf, the Indomalayan realm, and the east coast of Africa is the result and representation of this confluence of ‘cultural meaning' that Bose is proposing. When inspecting this geographic interregion, moreover, a range of non-cis gender identities are found across their port cities, such as the hijras of the subcontinent, mashogas in Kenya, and Thailand's so-called lady-boys. Do their histories confer and belong to this oceanic ‘interregion’ (28), rather than to their landed nations? If gender is truly an exercise in fluidity, should it not address geographies that are literally fluid and circulatory?







The contemporary Gulf demography institution, classified as national and/or outsider Gulf resident, is also reflective of these liminal landscapes. The vast corpus of Indian Ocean trade communities – pre-European colonialism – provide a lens into several layered geographies spread across the south eastern hemisphere that did not necessarily feedback into a centralised state existing on land, but a large oceanic space that evaded a localised, land-locked state with a clearly defined boundary, such as the Arabian Peninsula. These distinctions of land and water as spaces for articulation are pertinent for understanding the social makeup of the Lower Gulf states. 

The Peninsula’s lands earned modern, neoliberal power after oil, or gas, was discovered in its interiors during the late twentieth century, while its coasts had over time gained importance as strategic ports for global trade. With the discovery of oil, the newly inaugurated Gulf States encroached on their maritime infrastructures and integrated them as spaces for ‘national’ export, which had thus far been for importations and commercial exchange. What was considered as the ocean and water freezone was co-opted into the land affairs of the Peninsula and became the direct governmental interface with the world, which overshadowed the oceanic interregion, and unified the desert as an environmental imaginary for the assertion of a fixed, and located bedouin identity.




In the systems of today's small yet powerful Gulf States, designed by Europeans who legitimised their transition from colonial geographies into post-colonial ones, rooted pieces of land with its rooted set of people are projected as the rightful owners and rulers of this space: a space drawn up in absence from its wetlands. This land-locked state is especially emphasized when you examine the Peninsula's main architecture of governance, the majlis. It is a confined and rigid space – with little ventilation – alluding to political democracy and communal inclusion, where few subjects voice the needs of the greater populace (29).

This settled architecture proposes that the nation is dry and not wet. Think of the inland federational harmonisation of the U.A.E., and tensions existing at sea over islands that Iran claims as its own. Or how Iran's Kish Island belongs to none of Iran, the U.A.E., Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, but an officiated logistical space for the facilitation of historic interregional patterns of movement, trade, and migration -- today, it operates mainly as the processing center for the Gulf’s Kafala visa-sponsorship system.



The water, I contend, exemplifies the 'Gulf', an orbit of unacknowledged stories that emerge from the sea and linger at the bay of the Peninsula, sitting outside its dry, landed majlis. In this way, the Gulf is imagined into an identity, geography, and concept for state and institutional evasion. Gulf-Indians and Gulf-Iranians (who are historic merchants, sailors, migrants, proconsuls, pirates) are identifiable groups in this type of multipolar belonging oscillating between the positions of the Gulf and the Peninsula: the water and the majlis.

Water, then, becomes an urban and operative space for deliberate statelessness. For the Gulf, this is a space resisting the arbitrary frontiers of the Peninsula as enforced by the region’s historical colonisers and its local collaborators. Following this logic, positions in the Gulf literally become fluid, interchangeable, and malleable: similar to how xanith can move between genders and return to the position of male elder, so too can a Gulf resident occupy positions from indentured labour all the way up to a self-made Gulf billionaire.




In this sense, xanith, and the practice of homosexuality, can be seen as politicised identity that performs these tensions of amphibious and marginal belonging to the Gulf. This belies the assumption that the Gulf’s sexual identities, or elsewhere in the West Asian/Indian Ocean region, work towards emancipated selfhood, in a similar way to the Atlantic experience. Instead, I find, that these practices are representative of the multidirectional status role-playing, a behavioural, economic, and environmental know-how that has been performed, and cultivated, by various governments and communities across the Indian Ocean, to navigate, remain, and eventually prosper, within a particular context.




The Diesel, one of the better known critical pieces of Gulf literature, is a great example for this premise. Written by Thani al-Suwaidi, an Emirati poet and writer, and published in 1994, it narrates the life of a villager in a small Emirati coastal town who sets out on a self-discovering journey. It follows the struggle of a transgender protagonist who had to choose between living in a man’s body as a conventional ‘man’ or listening to his inner female soul (30). In the novella, The Diesel is born to parents who long for a son after many pregnancy difficulties. The mother passes away after giving birth. Not explicitly said in the book, but the father and family hold The Diesel responsible for the mother’s death and ultimately the protagonist is marginalised while growing up in his land-settled community. Eventually, The Diesel, experiences a ‘calling’ and takes on a daring career as a female entertainer and singer. She becomes the most sought-after voice luring sheikhs who beg to hear her voice at their celebrations and weddings. Eventually, The Diesel’s popularity grows to the extent that she is able to incite a rebellion against the ruling elite.


Throughout the pages of the book, the water surrounding the land appears as a vibrant, politicised and emancipatory space for The Diesel, while supernatural characters and queered folkloric figures swoop in and out of the story acting as guides for The Diesel’s nebulous place in the world: the sea.  In one scene, she comes across a dervish who explains, ‘these mortals have become embalmed, they know sea, sky, and mosque, but never ask themselves why they drown, why they haven’t learned to live under the water, why fish don’t adapt to living on dry land, why there should be this divine limitation and siege, why the Lord gave the largest area of the earth to the fish, or why there are more fish than people’ (31).


I would like to conclude with a call for the Wet Gulf, an imaginary terrain in which body, geography, and politics create a set of conditions for operating in the contemporary world, that is critical of universal humanist rights and views, as well as the emphasis on individual self-determination and preservation.







(1) Everett Rowson, “The Effeminates of Early Medina”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 (4), p. 671--693
(2) Ibid. 
(3) Unni Wikan, “Man Becomes Woman: Transsexualism in Oman as a Key to Gender Roles,” Man 12 (1977): 304--19. 
(4) Ibid. 
(5) Ibid. 
(6) Ibid. 
(7) Ibid. 
(8) John Archer and Barbara Llyod, Sex and Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 
(9) Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York: Routledge, 1997
(10) Stephen Murray, “The Sohari Khanith”, in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature, edited by Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe, New York: New York University Press, 1997, 244-56.
(11) Gill Shepherd, “Transsexualism in Oman?” , in Man NS 13, 1978,133–4.
(12) J. M. Carrier, “The Omani xanith controversy”, in Man NS 15, 1980, 541–42.
(13) Mbogoni, Lawrence, Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2012
(14) Sarah Croucher, “A Concubine is Still a Slave”, in The Archaeology of Colonialism: Sexual Encounters and Intimate Effects, edited by Barbara L. Voss, Eleanor Conlin Casella, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 67-81.
(15) Mbogoni, Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History, 2012
(16) Ibid. 
(17) Sarah Croucher, “A Concubine is Still a Slave”, in The Archaeology of Colonialism: Sexual Encounters and Intimate Effects, edited by Barbara L. Voss, Eleanor Conlin Casella, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 67-81.
(18) Sheriff, Abdul. Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770-1873. London, Nairobi, Tanzania, Athens,OH: James Currey, Heinemann Kenya, Tanzania Publishing House, Ohio University Press, 1987.
(19) See Mbogoni and Croucher.
(20) Mbogoni, Colonial Tanzania History, 165.
(21) Ibid. 166
(22) Ibid. 
(23) BR Burg's book Sodomoy and the Pirate Tradition (1995)
(24) Ibid. 
(25) Ibid. 
(26) Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 2006.
(27) Bose, Hundred Horizons: Indian Ocean, 23.
(28) Ibid.
(29) Takriti, Abdel Razaq, Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empire in Oman, 1965-1976.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.  
(30)  Thani Al-Suwaidi, The Diesel, Translated by William Maynard Hutchins. New York: Antibookclub, 2012. 
(31) Ibid., 69.  (visuals abstracted from satellite images from islands around Strait of Hormuz, Bab Al Mandab, Zanzibar, Gwadar and Lamu)
by Ahmad Makia
for Ibraaz
2016