Image: Mada’in Saleh (source Wiki Commons).

On top of a rock in a desert valley about 400km outside of Medina sits a rather curious sculpture. Najma (2020) is cross-legged, her palms placed on her knees facing up to the sky (in what new age yoga practitioners would recognise as the ‘lotus’ pose), her eyes closed in meditation. She glows an electric blue colour, from the ultramarine pigment added to her aluminium shell, and her head is loosely wrapped in the same colour blue scarf so that only her heavy fringe is visible. The Santa Monica-based artist who made her, Lita Albuquerque, saw her installation as “historic”, referring not simply to the fact that the figure was installed but “that it is accepted”. Much of the coverage of Najma has adopted this same positioning of Albuquerque and the other artists who created works to be exhibited as part of the inaugural Desert X AlUla festival. Clichés about Islam forbidding figurative art “especially of women” and outlawing it as idolatrous were repeated ad nauseam, as many rushed to present Najma as a ground-breaking first and evidence of a new “revolutionary spirit”.

The word ‘historic’ is what is known in some branches of philology as enantiosemic: it has two opposite meanings. When we speak of a ‘historic victory’, we mean a victory that is historically significant because it distinguishes itself from the rest of history – a first, an outlier, something revolutionary. But to speak of a ‘historic site’ is not to speak of a site that is an outlier from the rest of history, but one that makes a link between the distant past and the present. When Albuquerque used the term ‘historic’ of Najma, she was making reference to the adjective’s first meaning. My argument here will be that Najma is better understood as ‘historic’ in the second sense. The point of Najma is not to mark a ‘first’ but to forge a connection with the figurative statues dating from as early as the 5^th century BCE in the AlUla oasis where the sculpture now sits. In other words, Albuquerque’s sculpture is not ‘revolutionary’, it is classical. The point of it is not to be new and unexpected, but on the contrary to be unexpectedly ancient.

Image: Dadanite statues from AlUla, Saudi Arabia (source Wiki Commons).

The Hadith of the Haunted House (or: Vision 500 BCE)

AlUla is currently at the epicentre of the Saudi state’s production of its own nationalist history. Since 2016, led by King Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud and the Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz, Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a project known as Vision 2030. The project is described in explicitly nationalist terms (one of its three ‘Themes’ is entitled ‘An Ambitious Nation’) and heralded as a future-focussed programme of transformation. But even in the Kingdom’s official presentation of the project it is obvious that Vision 2030 relies on fabricating a particular kind of historical narrative: there is no Vision 2030 without a Vision 500 BCE.

AlUla is at the centre of this machine of history-making, with the creation of a Royal Comission for AlUla in 2017 promising the redevelopment of pre-Islamic sites like Hegra (Mada’in Salih). But a new interest in the pre-Islamic is making waves more widely across Saudi Arabia, focussed in particular around a new interest in three pre-Islamic goddess, Al Lat, Manat and Al Uzza. Commentators on this phenomenon have often defaulted to an economic explanation, noting the role that ancient sites are anticipated to play in the expansion of the tourism economy that is central to Vision 2030. Reporting on the project in 2019, Reuters wrote that: “Al-Ula’s development is part of a push to preserve pre-Islamic heritage sites in order to attract non-Muslim tourists, strengthen national identity and temper the austere strain of Sunni Islam that has dominated Saudi Arabia for decades”.  But the larger context beyond these economic motivations has been much less well understood. My view is that the redevelopment of AlUla and specifically Hegra has more to do with the second and third explanations in Reuters’ list than with the first. 

One way of making sense of Vision 2030’s dependence on telling a story about ancient history is by asking the question: why Hegra? Two particularities of this site stand out. The first is that it is Nabataean, that is to say, roughly contemporaneous with the Greeks and the Romans. The Nabataens were described by the Greek-language historian Diodorus Siculus in his Bibliotheca Historica (19.94-100), and annexed by the Emperor Trajan to the Roman empire in the 2^nd century CE. The second is that Hegra is believed by many Muslims to be a haunted place, inspired by a hadith in which the Prophet (sallAllahu alayhi wa salem) reportedly said that a site that some identify as Hegra should not be visited at all (for bibliography on this see this summary). Driving attention and resources to Hegra therefore creates for Saudi Arabia an ancient past comparable with Europe’s. And like Europe’s ancient past, it also one that is defined not just by the fact that it is pre-Islamic, but that it is un-Islamic – that is, it is oppositional with what was for many taken to be the dominant Muslim position on such sites. In other words, Vision 2030 is Saudi’s Renaissance, reliant on a storying of ancient history on the model of Europe’s Renaissance – Europe’s own invention of a classical past that was both pre- and crucially un-Islamic.

Image: Nabatean tomb in Hegra (Mada’in Salih), AlUla, Saudi Arabia (source: Wiki Commons).

Classicism, Kemalism, Nationalism and Islamism

Islamophobia crystallises on all sides of this historiographic argument. On the one hand the presumption that Muslims are antithetical to ancient heritage is an Islamophobic trope, and no doubt influence of the hadith forbidding access to Hegra is exaggerated in this light, leading to the Islamophobic caricature of Muslims as inherently iconoclastic and as the destroyers of antiquity – a caricature that is still being argued against in many fields of academic study. On the other hand, to tackle this example of historiographic Islamophobia by positioning Muslims as admirers of antiquity on the model of European classicism and philhellenism risks underplaying the fact that classicism has a political use for Saudi Arabia, just as it had a political use for colonial Europe: it feeds ethnonationalism. It functions as a kind of historiographic Kemalism (on this term see Sayyid 1997), a displacement of Islam in favour of a Westernese vision of ethnonationalist belonging.

I am not the first to point out that Saudi nationalism relies on a narrative of history. In the final column he wrote for The Washington Post before he was murdered at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul at the behest of Saudi royalty in 2018, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi commented on precisely this. Describing the restrictions placed on international press by authoritarian states, he distinguished Qatar’s ongoing support of international news coverage from “its neighbours’ efforts to uphold the control of information to support the ‘old Arab order’” (al-nizam al-Arabi al-qadim in the Arabic-language version of the column). Although Khashoggi is not making exactly the same point as me about classicism, it seems clear that he understood the fabrication of antiquity (al-qadim, ‘old’ in the English-language version) to serve a political project of Arab nationalism.

Much more important than the economic argument around tourism is, in my view, a political reading of this Renaissance of interest in Saudi’s ancient history. Classicism provides the Saudi state with a way of getting around an inconvenient truth: that the state currently known as Saudi Arabia is only as old as 1932. The appropriation of Nabateaen Hegra as its pre-history serves a nationalist narrative: long before the idea of Saudiness existed, there was an ancient Saudi, it offers. I have already made the point elsewhere that Europe’s Islamophobia is grounded in this same historiographic narrative, where the formative period for European identity is narrated as one that took place in a classical time before the coming of Islam. And other nationalist projects have used classicism to solve very similar problems. The so-called state of Israel – for example – is only as old as 1948, but relies on biblical sources to manufacture for itself an ancient history that presents the concept of Israel as nation extending back much further. Classicism is the historiographic tool of nationalism that allows ethnonationalist projects to retroject themselves into the distant past, imagining their exclusionary identities to be transhistorical.

There is a cruel irony to the fact that these two projects of historiographic nationalism have so much in common. One way to read these similarities is to understand both Israel and Saudi Arabia as engaged in a historiographic battle against Islamism (that is, against “a discourse that attempts to centre Islam within the political order” – “an Islamist”, writes Sayyid 1997, 17, “is someone who places her or his Muslim identity at the centre of her or his political practice”). In Saudi’s case this is often pointed out, with many Saudi nationalist commentators claiming that the neglect of the Kingdom’s pre-Islamic heritage before 2016 was a characteristic of “the Sahwa’s control over education and the media” – in other words, of Qutbism. Classicism, on this reading, is a historiographic method of prevention against Muslim political agency, whether in Israel or Saudi Arabia. It mobilises the ethnonationalism that has been so deadly for Muslims around the world (among them the victims of the Islamophobic genocides in Palestine, India, East Turkestan and other places) against ideas of a trans-national ummatic political consciousness that would require a wholly different (or counterclassical) way of telling the story of history. Much more is at stake in this classical ideal than an electric blue idol sitting cross-legged on a rock in the desert.