Icons of hospitality
After greetings, guests in the Gulf and Yemen are
offered refreshment, although what substance stands
for appropriate hospitality varies. In Oman and the
United Arab Emirates, coffee is central to hospital-
ity; a United Arab Emirates proverb says offering
coffee is considered “the aesthetic greeting of the
Arabs: (ta™iyat il ≠arab il fannànah)” (Kanafani
1983, 39). In the United Arab Emirates, morning or
afternoon visitors are given a fuàlah, a hospitality
ritual that involves first offering guests fruit,
sweets, and nuts, followed by coffee served in tiny
cups; when the visitor has had enough, she shakes
the cup sideways (Kanafani 1983, 20–3). In the
Omani town of Bahla, groups of neighbors drink
coffee in the morning, each woman bringing and
sharing her thermos of coffee and container of
dates. Together with the exchange of words, coffee
and dates are digested; balancing the exchange of
these items serves as a metaphor for sociality itself
(Limbert 2002). In Zabid, sweetened tea or qishr, a
spiced drink made from coffee husks, is brought to
a guest upon her arrival. In the Yemeni cities of
Sana≠a and Zabid, everyday sociability centers
around chewing qàt, a leaf which contains a mild
amphetamine. Hosts provide the cool, incensed
water and waterpipes full of tobacco that are
thought to enhance the pleasure of qàt, but guests
bring their own qàt, which they often exchange
with their hosts and the other guests present. In the
Gulf, and parts of Yemen where women do not
chew qàt, snack food, dates, and fruit tend to play
a greater role in hospitality (for Oman, Eickelman
1985; for ≠Amran, Dorsky 1986). Deaths are occa-
sions where the normal rules of hospitality are
reversed. For instance, in Zabid, a staple of hospi-
tality, sugar, is left out of the qishrduring mourning
visits. In the United Arab Emirates, the usual food
snacks are not served in mourning visits, lest the
enjoyment of the food take people’s minds from the
loss (Kanafani 1983, 79).Aesthetics of hospitality:
aromas, cleanliness, and
adornment
Scents, perfumes, incenses, and flowers play a
central role in hospitality all over the Gulf. In the
United Arab Emirates, women take pride in mak-
ing their own special blends of perfumes and
incenses from scented oils and gums. The special
blend of perfume that a hostess offers her guest
lingers and is evaluated by those in the next house
a guest visits (Kanafani 1983, 101). Omani host-
esses in the village of Hamra offer their guests the
fragrant herbs saffron and mahaleb with which to230 hospitality
paint their faces (Eickelman 1984, 156), while in
Bahla guests are offered an incense brazier and per-
fumes at the close of the visit (Limbert 2002).
Zabidi hosts welcome a new bride or special guest
with a string of aromatic jasmine flowers.
In the United Arab Emirates, houses should also
be sweet smelling and clean (Kanafani 1983);
Altorki notes that among the Jiddah elite a hostess
should keep a “glittering, spotless, generous house
valued by the community” (1986, 102). Just as it is
a duty (wàjib) for the hostess to honor the guest by
being clean and well dressed, in a spotless house, it
is also the duty of the guests to honor the hostess by
appearing clean and nicely attired. As in so many
aspects of social life in the Gulf and Yemen, the eti-
quette of hospitality is not separate from religious
morality. Indeed, in the United Arab Emirates, the
social obligation for people to be clean is under-
stood in reference to a ™adìthof the Prophet
Mu™ammad, who notes that the clean person is a
considerate person (Kanafani 1983, 93).
A woman should be dressed and bejeweled ac-
cording to her status; the inevitable differences in
adornment index not only indicate the relative
wealth of families, but gold jewelry also communi-
cates a woman’s moral worth and her husband’s or
father’s love (™ubb). In Yemen’s capital, Sana≠a,
women’s adult identities are constituted through
adornment in the public sphere of tafri†a, women’s
daily afternoon visits. Despite its association with
marriage, adornment is appreciated beyond its sig-
nificance for sexual attraction between men and
women (vom Bruck 2002). Weddings are often the
apotheosis of hospitality events; hosts and guests
wear their nicest finery; in Zabid, this is the time
when the host family’s widest network of connec-
tions will recognize their generosity by partaking in
the wedding lunch (Meneley 1996, 124–5).
There is a reciprocal effect to generosity: the host
offers hospitality, but the guest must accept it prop-
erly. Not to accept what the host offers, or to
appear inappropriately adorned at a formal social
event is to dishonor the host. In this moral econ-
omy, prestige is garnered in the social world for
generous hospitality. However, the wealthy are
those who are most able to offer generous hospital-
ity and therefore to reap the moral value perceived
to redound from it, in this world and the next.Bibliography
S. Altorki, Women in Saudi Arabia. Ideology and behav-
ior among the elite, New York 1986.
S. Altorki and D. P. Cole, Arabian oasis city. The trans-
formation of ≠Unayzah, Austin, Tex. 1989.
G. vom Bruck, Elusive bodies. The politics of aesthetics
among Yemeni elite women, in T. Saliba, C. Allen, and