Bedouin Visual Leadership in the Middle East: The Power of Aesthetics and Practical Implications

Chapter 1: Visualizing Leadership in Bedouin Arabia

In Chapter 1, I present the topic of study, clarify the terminology (including such fundamental concepts as Arab, Arabic, Arabia, Muslim, and Orient), and describe the philosophical perspective, particularly with respect to Foucauldian analysis, and the methodology. In the process, I explain my approach to leadership as a socially constructed phenomenon and the theoretical framework for the book. This introductory chapter also provides an overview of the relevant academic literature on leadership and the ontological foundation of the research regarding the power of visual messages.

Chapter 2: The Leader's Perspective

The focus in Chapter 2 is on the visual discourse of leadership, with publicly displayed images of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, the Bedouin leader of Dubai, serving as a case study. The analysis presented here is based on the first phase of the empirical research that I conducted for this project. More specifically, I describe the point of view established by a select set of official representations of Dubai's leading business and political figure.

Chapter 3: The Artist's Voice

In Chapter 3, I explore the creation of visual images by presenting the results of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with eight Arab artists. These interviews provide a nuanced picture of the communication process, including the context and the content of leadership messages. I draw attention to the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of these artists' work in order to arrive at insights into their notions of leadership, power, authority, discourse, surveillance, heroism, and gaze.
I purposely selected artists from diverse backgrounds for the interviews. Thus, some painted portraits and others did not; some were living in the UAE and others elsewhere. The interview questions concerned the artist's subjects, what they aimed to achieve through their art, their representation of leadership, the concept of power, the influence of Bedouin society on their paintings, and their depiction of the UAE and other governments. I also asked about the artistic process, including the use of color and light. Included in this chapter as well are numerous reproductions of these artists' work so that readers of the book can appreciate for themselves the power of the images as they are discussed.

Chapter 4: The Audience's Perspective

In Chapter 4, the focus is on the audience for and the reception of messages relating to leadership encoded in images. For this third phase of my empirical research into the visual aspects of leadership and audiences' interpretations of messages, I presented three of the images of Sheikh Mohammed discussed in Chapter 2 to ten residents of Dubai of various nationalities and cultural backgrounds. The chapter, then, explores their assessments of these images.

Chapter 5: The Power of Aesthetics