The celebrated film composer Hans Zimmer was not in fact approached to write a new national anthem for Saudi Arabia, as was reported recently. He was invited by a leading adviser to the Saudi crown to work on a film project about The Battle of Yarmuk. This was a decisive Muslim victory that ended Roman rule in Syria after about seven centuries and allowed the advance of Islam into the near East. What was discussed with Zimmer, alongside his role in the film project about the deep history of a religion as a political force, was an arrangement of the Saudi national anthem: taking the same tune and making it work for different musicians.
This story is typical of our attitude to Saudi Arabia as a jejune nation, a thin layer of post-modern nationhood, predicated on barbarity. Although women in Saudi Arabia have seen legal improvements to their rights and large changes in social attitudes since 2017, our preoccupation is not with the direction of change but the existing condition. Our other focus is with the huge immigrant working class in Saudi Arabia, predominantly from South Asia. Life for those who come to the country is tough and there are places where abuses of rights take place. Whether campaign groups inflating figures about worker deaths in construction based on extrapolated figures from the Bangladeshi and Pakistani embassies are helping paint an accurate picture is another matter. The brutality of how Mohammed bin Salman, de facto leader since 2017, has dealt with opposition is also significant.
These issues for some people are where the discussion of Saudi Arabia begins and ends; for others they cloud assessments of the breadth of Saudi nation-building and realpolitik at work under MBS. Any top-level cultural moves are characterised as corporatist rebrands of an imperial rump that won the petro-dollar lottery. Changes in the field of are the product of foreign management consultants, transport engineers, and god forbid, architects, employed to define its image and purpose. Within the ostensibly economic document Vision 2030 — what is this, a country or a company? — there is a strong cultural component. We are familiar with its most high profile thrust: Formula One cars tearing up and down Jeddah’s Corniche and the wild CGIs of the 2034 World Cup bid. There is however another quieter, cleverer idea about culture at work and it is slowly making itself known.
Currently taking place, away from the obvious power nexus in Riyadh, is an event, which in a small way exemplifies the subtlety and ingenuity of Saudi cultural politics under MBS. In the nation’s second city of Jeddah, the second Islamic Arts Biennale is taking place. Only in its second year, the IAB is an unprecedented Biennale in that it is not an exhibition of contemporary work. It is primarily a temporary exhibition of historical artefacts produced within the Islamic faith, owned by a host of world institutions, of extreme cultural and occasionally financial value. Bizarrely it takes place in a terminal of King Abdulaziz International Airport on the northern edge of Jeddah, a city of 4 million stretched out along the eastern shore of the Red Sea. This though is not any airport terminal but the temporary terminal for pilgrims who arrive and depart from Jeddah when travelling on the Hajj pilgrimage every June.
The terminal is nothing but incredible teflon awnings, which hosts a melee of pilgrims in the summer. This new event uses that space to create something that feels something like an art fair. It is full of objects made from the 7th century all the way up to the present day: The Briolette of India, a diamond cut in the 1900s by the era’s greatest diamond cutter Atanik Eknayan; an original text by Fibonacci shows the first use of the figure zero in European literature; maps of the River Euphrates and Nile made for the great 17th century Ottoman adventurer Evliya Çelebi. The IAB is primarily about bringing work not just from throughout the Islamic world, from Indonesia and from Mali, from the heart of Central Asia to its fringes where it encountered other cultures. Over 30 key organisations have taken part: The Qatar National Library, The V&A, the Bodleian in Oxford, Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo, The Louvre. The launch event was full of key figures from museums from around the world.
The Vision 2030 document, available on the internet but also readable on the inflight entertainment on Saudia airlines, includes the following statement: “As the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia holds the honour and responsibility of being the custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. The Kingdom recognises its duty to preserve the identity and connections of Islam, and to serve the 18 billion Muslims around the world.” The document makes clear that Saudi wants to use, or celebrate its role as the custodians of the two great holy sites of Islam, Medina and Mecca. It also wants to promote itself more generally as a custodian of Islamic culture in the region. The Biennale is an example of this ambition, displaying, for the first time, the kiswah, the cloth that is draped over the ka’baah at the heart of Mecca, in long luxurious folds is on show. Other items that have remained hidden to people other than Muslim pilgrims are on show: a chamber showing the footprints of Abraham made when he built the first mosque.
Now these may just be relics or exotic gee-gaws to some but to others they are key material artefacts in the cultural history of our planet. The Saudis have made a bold move in displaying them to an international viewership, subjecting them to potential criticism from hardline Islamic clerics domestically and abroad. The move though is a clever one. The Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in 2017 cost approximately $1.4 billion to build, including the cost of the building itself, the use of the Louvre name, and fees for borrowed artworks. And yet it has yet to be proven whether the Louvre can sustain the visitor numbers over the years and whether the ongoing payments warrant the attraction. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha which opened in 2008, has already been overhauled once. The institution burned brightly at their opening, but the longer haul may be more difficult, and different ways to create interesting shows may be needed.
On the other side for political reasons European Museums are desperate to deflect from issues of decolonisation and repatriation, not through robust argument in defence but by putting on jointly curated and funded exhibitions or coming up with new wheezes for sharing artifacts. (It was notable that in the UK the Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer charged incoming director of the British Museum Nicholas Cullinan to “strengthen its world-leading partnerships” when he was appointed.) We are entering an era when horse trading — or camel trading — is going to become an order of the day.
In coming to the soft power cultural game much later than the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia may have stolen a march on their rivals through necessity. The Biennale not only removes the need for massive building projects (and also finds purpose for an underused existing building) it eradicates the protracted “decolonising” conversations about who stole what from whom when and where artefacts should be returned to, taking place within museums globally. It creates a temporary space in which these political debates can be elided and conversations, and curatorially ones, with cultural power-broking lurking in the background, can take precedence. Indeed the conversations that happen in Jeddah will be where perhaps the exhibitions of the future are created.
the Saudis … might have created a model for an entire cultural field in the 21st century
We may think of the built environment of the future in Saudi Arabia as The Line, the superstructure being built in the desert in the North West. Saudi Arabia has taken significant steps to catalog and preserve its historical heritage monuments and buildings. Over 250 heritage assets have been coded and 850 buildings in urban heritage areas documented. In the last years the old market district of Al-Balad which was founded in the 8th century when the first pilgrims landed in Jeddah, selling produce that they’d brought with them, to pay for the final leg of their journey. The truth is that whilst the Saudi state is new, the culture and religion which informs it, and of which it is custodian, has a long, complex history; full of nuance and interest.
Far from being the shallow post-modernist entity that the Zimmer story suggests, Saudi Arabia, calling history into its service, is an increasingly complex intersection of forces, some of which prompt powerful moral and ethical responses in the west. But what it is not is straightforward and the cultural programme that the current leadership is undertaking should not be underestimated. Never mind its moves in sport or cinema, in museology alone, the Saudis may have found a model which suits their nomadic history but also makes a claim for its second city as an international cultural hub. It also might have created a model for an entire cultural field in the 21st century.
