Change Everything No 34: Uncovering the real history of Saudi Arabia

How do you create a fictional history of a nation? Crucial is to destroy: knock down buildings, redirect roads, and above all, destroy records

Book news

Not a whole book, but a book chapter: in Great Misconceptions Rewilding Myths and Misunderstandings, edited by Ian Parsons, I have a chapter about rewilding our parliament and politics. That doesn’t actually mean having an aurochs thundering through central lobby, a lynx curled up in the Speaker’s chair and ravens beadily monitoring Lords ministers from the throne, although I had have fun with that idea. But what we know about healthy ecosystems - which are rich in diversity and complex interactions, creative and flourishing - are what we need, and certainly don’t have, in Westminster and our broader. politics.

Uncovering the real history of Saudi Arabia

It was a New Books Network podcast with J.E. Petersen, author of The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History that really got me thinking I needed to know a lot more about the back story of the Saudi regime, one of political topics on which I do as much as I can, highlighting the massive human rights abuses within its borders (particularly the treatment of women), the awful slaughter in Yemen, our massive arms sales into an unstable situation. (Such regimes always fall, and where will the arms end up then? See Afghanistan and Libya.)

So when I saw a recommendation for Rosie Bsheer’s Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia, I had to ask the wonderful London Library to get a copy. (One of the major perks of membership is that they usually will.)

The book provides a good general history of the rise of the House of Saud, but what lifts it above the pack of general history is three things.

First, that Bsheer is focused on what is physically happening on the ground, to buildings, streets, walls, the very structures of history and the fabric of everyday lives, a rich approach that - with so much research being text-based - doesn’t get nearly so much attention as it should.

So Bsheer explains:

“The project of history and heritage making was subsumed under urban redevelopment plans that highlighted the importance of the ‘old’ and historic in Riyadh - which referred only to Al Saud’s political history and the ‘new’ and hypermodern in the much older city of Mecca. The ordering of urban space outside of Riyadh, and in Mecca in particular, before the Gulf War already spoke to the limits of Saudi hegemony. On an ideological level, this space was material out of which alternative histories could be constructed. Ottoman-era forts and mosques hinted at imperial remnants of other political geographies on the peninsula. The houses of the Hashemite Ashraf - a tribal Arab dynasty said to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad and who governed the Hijaz from the tenth century until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 - stood as monuments to the historical possibility of an Arabian present absent Al Saud. Religious shrines lurked as permanent reminders of the heterogeneity of Islam’s many manifestations… Schools, coffee shops and cultural institutions spoke to intellectually diverse and cosmopolitan pasts that troubled the state’s insular and homogenous narration of the past… Erasure, then, became a fundamentally important mechanism for the state’s new project to remake Saudi Arabia’s cities - both in the sense of cleansing the arhcaeological and arhcitectural record of those edificial remnants of subversive histories and in the sense of sweeping away those materially tethered social relations that resist the march of commoditized progress.” (p. 24)

Of course Saudi Arabia is far from the only place such projects have been carried out. The book left me thinking about what’s been done to London’s Docklands area - the history of slavery and empire being subsumed under the glass and steel of neoliberal finance, with virtually no acknowledgement of what came before, and provided the financial foundations of today.

A reshaped city Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash

Secondly, Bsheer has a fascinating story to tell about the place of Mecca: “Mecca’s people and its visitors were actually integral to fashioning political modernity….As late as 2010, walking in the narrow winding alleyways of Central Mecca, one saw traces of non-Saudi Arabian pasts that were pivotal not only for intellectual, social and urban history, but also for Saudi state formation. Old neighbourboods organized along lines of ethnic origin, non-Arabic street and building names, classical Islamic and Ottoman architecture, and Ottoman cultural institutions and coffeehouses once threw the discrpenacy between the realities and written historical texts into stark contract. Since the late 2000s, the state has accelerated the destruction of these spaces, displacing the residences and rendering the unsanctioned histories they expose difficult, if not impossible, to discern.” (p. 33-4)

Key to that story is Muhammad Rahmatullah al-Kairanawi (1818-1891), a prominent religious scholar and anticolonialist, having “called for armed struggle against British rule in what became known as the 1857 Rebellion. He then led 200 mujahadideen from Najibahad in Utter Pradesh to Delhi. The British army crushed the rebellion and put out a call for al-Kairanawi’s arrest. The scholar escaped to Bombay. From there, he sailed to the port of Mocha in Yemen and then walked more than a thousand kilometres north to Islam’s holiest city, Mecca… had become a haven for Muslim rebels fleeing repression. For some, it was a transit point on the way to Cairo, Java and other destinations. For others, like al-Kairanawi, it became a permanent home … South Asian scholar-activist … brought with them a panoply of anticolonial and modernist ideas - secular and religious, reformist and revolutionary.” (p. 30) “Such global concepts as modern constitutionalism, nationalism, political rights and revolution - shaped as they were by transoceanic exchange - reached the Arabian Peninsula’s shores in the late 19th century, not long after they began to circulate elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire.” Before and after the Second World War, other political refugees arrived from Syria, North Africa, Egypt and the Gulf. It was a place of “intellectual exchange and political solidarities”. (p. 32)

Thirdly, the book sets out in stark relief the actions following November 2 1964, when Faisal Ibn Abdulaziz Al Saud overthrew his brother Saud in a palace coup. In conflict with the rhetorically powerful force of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, as well as the continuing internal opposition, Bsheer stresses how not only individuals had to be repressed, imprisoned, intimidated or exiles, but so too stories and records.

“Faisal … asked the US government for the technical equipment and training needed to bolster the regime’s symbolic capital. Distinct from his predecessor, Saud, whose reign featured a semblence of press freedom, Faisal invested in firm control of the production and circulation of knowledge about Aravia and the monarch… The aim was to wash away any remnant of Saud’s regime, the popular movements that had thrived therein, and any trace of the US-sanctioned coup against his brother….the new law required not only that the state be part owner of any Saudi newspaper but also that newspaper editors work closely with the Ministry of Information and its censors… the regime undertook its first endeavour to construct a state archive… an archival record would allow the state to conceal the rich leftist history of Arabia and the attendant violent counterrevolutionary measures…At the same time, however, the state needed to keep state policies, bureaucratic machinations, and family power struggles confidential, not only from the public but also from the various fiefdoms that constituted Saudi power.” (pp. 67-8)

Of course to George Orwell - as expressed in 1984 - the importance of controlling history is obvious, but it is fascinating to see the whole play in action here so clearly. But also to learn from Bsheer - in ways that with obvious necessity are only lightly detailed - that there is considerable resistance to this state endeavour, with families maintaining, as an act either of political resistance or perhaps just stubborn maintenance of geneological tradition, private archives hidden from the arms of the state.

And this book is particularly timely given the increasingly obviously shaky foundations of Saudi Arabia’s flagship Neom project, whose chief executive has just been sacked, despite a glitzy launch party featuring global celebs. This, one more massive human rights abuse, with credible reports of 21,000 deaths associated with it and related projects, in an area from which a similar number of indigenous people were forcibly removed.

(An academic review of the book can be found here.)

Picks of the week

Reading

One of a stable of wonderful new city newsletters - many of which are on my recommended list here on Substack - The Mill has been looking into the history of what was (arguably) the first suburb, Whalley Range in Manchester. where banker Samuel Brooks from 1834 started building (homes, and also a wall around them - fascinating that the first suburb was also a gated community, with its own police force). Never been a fan of the suburbs, having grown up in one…

Listening

Good news that the brilliant Byzantium and Friends podcast is back in the swing, with an epside with Nancy Bisaha on The Fall of Constantinople, pope Pius II, and the birth of Europe. Fascinating how much impact 1453 had across the Continent - and the origins of the West/East binarisation (was it the Roman Empire? perhaps at least in part). The pope himself is a fascinating and much-travelled figure, formerly Aeneas Piccolomini, an Italian humanist of relatively humble background, before his elevation he even went to Scotland, which was seriously getting off the beaten track.

Source

Thinking

I feel like I need to scream this from the rooftops. We have VERY LITTLE idea of how our genome actually works. It is NOTHING like a simple “machine blueprint”. We uncover one layer of complexity - that elements of non-protein-coding DNA control the operation of the coding. And then we find these are far from simple switches, as this study demonstrates.

“The architecture of regulatory sequences in the genome is much more complex than previously thought….a mutation could affect the amount of several ingredients at the same time. However, it is also possible that the enhancers retain their independence and continue to control the amount of a single ingredient, even though their sequences are interwoven and shared.”

Researching

Before there were towns and cities, the 20th-century idea of “progress” was that human were near-naked “savages”, wandering around the landscape and mostly managing to stumble across enough food to gather or hunt by luck. Of course, most of the human past was nothing like that: humans (and maybe other hominid species) managed landscapes, in ways we are starting to find evidence of, when we look. A great example is this complex 4,000-year-old systems of canals in Central America, designed to bring the fish to the fishers with minimum effort.

Almost the end

World AntimicrobialAwareness Week is coming to an end. Why was, and is, it important?

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