Rosie Bsheer

Archive Wars

The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"This project examines how Saudi Arabian officials and economic elites used state archives, historical preservation, and urban redevelopment to consolidate power after the Gulf War. It shows how the Saudi regime attempted to shift the terrain of domestic opposition from the political to the historical and from the streets to institutions, transforming the nation's landscape into a revenue-generating asset"--

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Produktdetails

• Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures
• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 416
• Erscheinungstermin: 22. September 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 224mm x 149mm x 27mm
• Gewicht: 628g
• ISBN-13: 9781503612570
• ISBN-10: 1503612570
• Artikelnr.: 57166067

Autorenporträt

Rosie Bsheer is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: The Archive Question
chapter abstract
In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, ruling elites in Saudi Arabia
adopted measures that aimed to reconfigure state power by pacifying wartime
popular opposition, reshaping the politics of subject formation, and
diversifying the petroleum economy. The ensuing struggle over state
form-what I call archive wars-revolved around the production of history,
the reordering of space, and the repurposing of valuable real estate.
Historicizing these practices helps us rethink the nature of modern
archival formation as well as statecraft while calling into question
scholarly assumptions about the cohesiveness of authoritarian states, and
of states in general. Approaching the domains of history making and urban
planning as mutually constitutive, contested, and ongoing material
practices of state formation complicates conventional understandings of the
nature of state power and its imbrication with archive formation.
1Occluded Pasts
chapter abstract
This chapter takes up one strand of sociopolitical and cultural life in
late Ottoman Mecca: the school of Indian religious scholar Muhammad
Rahmatullah al-Kairanawi and its relation to the emergence of an
intellectually engaged Hijazi middle class during the nahda. The chapter
then attends to how the Saudi state occluded and repackaged this history
since 1932. Beyond the symbolic power it bestowed upon its rulers, Mecca
was a space where intellectual debate flourished, honing the minds of
thinkers who became central figures in twentieth-century politics and
religion. Yet Mecca's past is absent from histories of the Hijaz and of
Saudi Arabia and from histories of intellectual thought, cultural
production, and political activism in the late Ottoman period. Unearthing
these transregional histories is urgent because the Saudi state has been
destroying the city's built environment in lockstep with the logic of
historical erasure and state formation.
2A State With No Archive
chapter abstract
In 1966, at the height of the struggle between reactionary and progressive
forces that pitted Al Saud against Gamal Abdel Nasser and progressive
forces inside Saudi Arabia, King Faisal passed the country's first
archiving law. The aim was to choreograph a sanitized version of history
and to reify elites' political, territorial, economic, and cultural claims.
This chapter connects the beginning of archival praxis in Cold War Arabia
to the necessity of managing elite power rivalries and fending off threats
from regional rivals and domestic political movements. These anxieties
shaped archival praxis and subsequently institutionalized a culture of
secrecy and rivalry across the bureaucracy, with the push and pull of the
archival operation mirroring the rivalries endemic to the Saudi state.
Tracing the battles to produce an archive from the mid-1960s until the late
1980s shows how Saudi Arabia complicates conventional thinking about
archives and about the authoritarian state itself.
3Assembling History
chapter abstract
In the 1990s, Saudi Arabia's top rulers sought to shift the grounds for
political legitimation, subject formation, and economic diversification to
maintain power following the Gulf War. This required the production of
primary source materials for a revised, secular official history, the
repositories that would house them, and the spaces that would monumentalize
such a discourse. The Darah, along with the Ariyyadh Development Authority,
assembled the past and its spaces in Riyadh. With the backing of Salman,
who was Riyadh's governor at the time, the low-grade archive fever of the
1970s got a second lease on life. Like Faisal before him, Salman faced
challenges to centralizing the archive: from members of the ruling family,
politicians and bureaucrats, activists and archivists. Institutional acts
of history making and placing put into question the coherence of historical
narration and memorialization, and expose archival anxieties and rivalries
among the architects of state building.
4Heritage as War
chapter abstract
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, an army of urban planners, economists,
historians, archeologists, and tourism consultants descended upon Riyadh.
Under the aegis of the High Commission for the Development of Arriyadh,
they brainstormed ideas for the redevelopment of the capital city, with an
eye to the economic, political, and social challenges that the country was
facing in the late twentieth century. The Arriyadh Development Authority
oversaw the production of a regulatory planning document that would
transform Riyadh into the administrative, cultural, economic, touristic,
and historical center of Saudi Arabia. This chapter examines the production
and destruction of historical sites since the 1950s. It shows how the 1990s
saw the acceleration of the remaking of historical areas in Riyadh and the
creation of a productive heritage industry therein. Memorialization came to
constitute a key node in the postwar architectural reformulation of the
state.
5Bulldozing the Past
chapter abstract
Since the early 2000s, the Saudi state summarily dynamited whole mountains
around the Grand Mosque, destroying much of Islam's material history and
replacing it with commercial megaprojects. The deliberate demolition of
historical and religious sites in Mecca starkly contrasts with the
preservation of more recent and dilapidated sites associated with Al Saud's
heritage in Riyadh. In post-Gulf War Saudi Arabia, Mecca came to serve a
different legitimating purpose, one rooted in grandiose infrastructural
projects and aesthetics, wherein secular time overwhelmed religious
temporality and subjectivity. The regime used Wahhabi iconoclasm and the
need to modernize the hajj to justify such destruction. This chapter shows
how the city's urban "renewal" was inextricable from archival formation and
urban planning in Riyadh. The neoliberal city was at the heart of the
twinned postwar process of real estate and heritage development, with Al
Saud and the Binladin family reaping billions off its redevelopment.
Conclusion: The Violence of History
chapter abstract
This chapter centers on how Saudi rulers instrumentalized religion to
pacify post-Gulf War popular contestation and shifted the basis of state
legitimation to secular historical memorialization, political
commemoration, and urban redevelopment. Using these material practices, it
shows how statecraft, even in authoritarian regimes, evolves diachronically
in response to a multiplicity of challenges, not least of which is popular
opposition. The postwar project, however, was transformed at different
critical junctures: the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia in the 2000s, the
Arab Uprisings, and the ascension of the postwar project's architect,
Salman ibn Abdulaziz, to the throne in 2015. With Salman in power, the
archival landscape, both institutional and spatial, has for the most part
succumbed to his decades-long national vision. Cultural and urban
redevelopment reflects the material culture and built environment of
Salman's Saudi Arabia, which enshrined his view of the past, present, and
future.