"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"--
abstractThis article takes up the occluded history of a particular category of migrant—the migrant scholar—in late Ottoman Mecca. It does so through the trajectory of the prominent Indian religious and anti-colonial scholar Muhammad Rahmatullah al-Kairanawi (1818–1891) and the afterlives of al-Sawlatiyya, the school he founded in 1873 in Mecca, where many South Asian and other scholars and rebels sought refuge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through his teaching and public activism in Mecca, he built the scaffolding of a long intellectual and political legacy. Kairanawi and other scholar-activists brought with them a panoply of anti-colonial and modernist ideas—secular and religious, reformist and revolutionary. Exposing the centrality of migrant scholars to the social, intellectual, and political fabrics of Arabian and South Asian lifeworlds reveals another Arabia, one that demolition and historical revision—now mundane universal practices—seek to permanently erase. Doing so also delivers profound lessons on the figure of the migrant as scholar, on the imperative of transcending national history, and on thinking of history itself as punctured by continuous crises.
On 25 October 2017, the Saudi Arabian regime granted citizenship to Sophia, a humanoid robot developed in Hong Kong. Sophia became the world's first robot citizen. Some of the globe's wealthiest investors, foreign dignitaries, and foremost economists, journalists, and public relations experts celebrated the conferral firsthand. They were guests of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, where they attended the inaugural Future Investment Initiative. Sponsored by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the forum heralded the regime's renewed commitment to diversify the country's petro-economy, develop its human capital, and increase its global investment competitiveness. The national reform plan, dubbed Vision 2030, dominated the event's discussions. Vision 2030 was an ambitious blueprint that had as its goal nothing short of overhauling everyday life in Saudi Arabia. It entailed revamping bureaucratic capacity, building global gigacities, and opening the country to visitors and investors alike. Developing the tourism and entertainment sectors were key. Through these lucrative socio-technical experiments, the regime hoped to tackle the dire economic, financial, and social challenges it faced. To appeal to the global investor, it framed the reforms in the language of high-tech modernization, sustainable development, and socioreligious tolerance. Sophia, and all the trappings of modernization that "she" embodied, epitomized the ruling class's entrepreneurial vision for a new Saudi Arabia, and in turn, a new global citizen: the naturalized elite as well as the new Saudi Arabian citizen-subject (Fig. 1).
The construction of heritage can be a violent process. Authorizing state-sanctioned narratives and the spaces that materialize them are belligerent acts. Crafting and territorializing a singular history out of many entangled ones necessarily relies on the destruction, containment, and/or silencing of the evidentiary terrain—of people, places, and things. In this sense, the construction of the past—to play on Carl von Clausewitz's well-known maxim—is the continuation of war by other means. As networks of knowledge production and transmission, "lieux de mémoire" are everyday sites of violence that embody ongoing social relations and the attendant struggles over power. In times of peace as in war, they are terrains of symbolic and material contestation whose creative destruction can be deployed as political spectacles and projections of power. Examples of such dynamics abound, whether in the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North America or Palmyra, Baghdad, and Mecca in the Middle East. In its varied forms, then, heritage is as much a cause for celebration for some as it is a cause of injury for others. Heritage reflects the power to subjugate the past to the politics of the present and to dictate the future, both of which are intrinsic to state and subject formation.
Abstract This introduction to the special section "Inter-Asian Cold War Linkages" shows how an interdisciplinary group of ten scholars take up the understudied Cold War linkages between the Middle East, on the one hand, and East and South Asia on the other. They examine how the inter-Asian lens allows us to rethink the history of the twentieth-century Middle East. Central to such rethinking is the destabilization of some of the dichotomous categories that were normalized during the Cold War and that have greatly shaped how we view culture, economy, politics, and society. These include the categories of state/nonstate, national/transnational, revolution/counterrevolution, religion/secularism, and private/public. Instead of taking these dualities for granted, the scholars here foreground the blurred and dialectical relationship between them, utilizing the Middle East as a site of critical analysis, learning, and theorizing and putting its study in conversation with the more Asia-centric and transnationally attuned literatures of the global Cold War.4 In the process, alternative genealogies and relationalities of the Middle East emerge, ones that place the Middle East in the world rather than prioritize how "the world" has acted on the Middle East, usually as a periphery or site of intervention. Doing so brings into view new ways, periodizations, and scales of studying the global Middle East in general and the Cold War in particular.
Que change au Moyen-Orient la nouvelle diplomatie du roi Salman? / Fatiha Dazi-Héni -- Les régions d'Arabie saoudite face au pouvoir central / Philippe Pétriat -- Être chiite au royaume wahhabite: le destin de ces « autres » Saoudiens / Toby Matthiesen -- Islam, droit et radicalisme / Stéphane Lacroix -- La Mecque et la politique saoudienne du réaménagement urbain / Rosie Bsheer -- La littérature saoudienne: reflet d'une société en mutation / Salwa Almaiman -- Al-Tahliya, une chanson de la jeunesse brisée de Riyad / Pascal Ménoret, Nadav Samin -- Pétrole, chômage et éducation: vers la fin d'une économie de rente? / Giacomo Luciani -- L'enjeu agricole saoudien: un défi environnemental / Bernard Faye -- Femmes en Arabie saoudite: ségrégation de genre et nationalisation des emplois / Amélie Le Renard.
