Rosie Bsheer’s research while affiliated with Harvard University and other places

This 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).

This article examines the silenced history of popular leftist movements in mid-twentieth-century Saudi Arabia. Specifically, it takes up the co-constitutive relationship between popular politics and state formation, a relationship that has done much to shape contemporary Saudi Arabia. We often associate Saudi Arabia with regime politics rather than bottom-up social forces, and with radical Islam rather than radical leftist politics. This article argues that the politically reactionary, religiously conservative, authoritarian monarchy that we are familiar with today, and with which we associate “Islamic fundamentalism,” was not always an inevitability. It was produced in the context of Cold War Arabia in response to the radical movements that challenged the strengthening forces of authoritarianism, US imperialism and unfettered oil capitalism in the 1950s. Through a critical reading of rarely utilized Saudi Arabian primary sources, the article engages the emergence of clandestine socialist, communist and Arab nationalist political parties that threatened Al Saud’s monarchy, the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) and US dominance in Arabia. It shows how together and separately, these reactionary forces crushed the popular movements, foreclosed progressive politics in Saudi Arabia and elided these events in Saudi and US historiographies in order to to maintain their interests in a tense Middle East caught in the web of Cold War politics. Unearthing the lost archives of the Saudi Left, this article presents a more complex social history of Saudi Arabia, one that situates the kingdom in the history of US imperialism and the global Left and forces us to reconsider the multiple forces complicit in producing the counterrevolutionary Saudi state.

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.