WRITING HISTORY IN AN ABSOLUTE MONARCHY: THE CASE OF SAUDI ARABIA

It is a truism that history matters to all states, which pick and choose from the national past to achieve political ends. In monarchical states, royal families often use history to legitimate their rule. Meanwhile, in authoritarian contexts it is the state that authorizes historical narratives; dissenting voices are either prevented from publication in the country or silenced altogether.Footnote ⁸

History writing in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia shares both of these characteristics to varying degrees. The Al Saʿud retain power in part through the perpetuation of a particular memory of their ancestors’ “unification” of the country. The grand narratives of Saudi historiography concentrate on the history of Najd, from where the Al Saʿud originate, and the Hijaz, where the two holy places of Islam—Mecca and Medina—are located. While hailing the efforts of the Al Saʿud and allied tribes to “unify” the Arabian Peninsula, they largely leave out pre-Islamic history.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, they hardly mention the Shiʿa in the East of the country, for the state fears that frequent mention of them in official historical narratives could strengthen Shiʿi political consciousness and provoke “hostility from hard-line Sunnis.”Footnote ¹⁰ Where the Shiʿa do come up, it is in the context of the fight against “unbelievers,” with the Shiʿa being labelled as rawāfiḍ (rejectionists), a derogatory term often used in Saudi Arabia to describe Shiʿa. This grand historical narrative is disseminated in and perpetuated through the public school system.Footnote ¹¹

Although many Saudi Shiʿi historians are university educated and some hold PhDs, no leading Shiʿi intellectual works in a Saudi department of history or is able to publish work on Saudi Shiʿi history in Saudi Arabia. Sunni historians at Saudi universities have written extensively about what is now the Eastern Province (but which before the 1950s was called al-Ahsa) of Saudi Arabia, with particular emphasis on the last period of Ottoman rule (1871–1913)Footnote ¹² and the emergence of the oil industry.Footnote ¹³ The historiography of the era prior to 1913 is more balanced and less censored than the period after 1913. However, state-funded research institutions do not allow for divergence from the key aspects of official historiography, such as the narrative of the “unification” (tawḥīd) of the Kingdom's different regions.Footnote ¹⁴

In my interviews with local Shiʿi historians, many stated that their childhood encounters with hostile religious and historical narratives pushed them to want to counter these narratives as adults. Drawing on James Scott, Madawi al-Rasheed argues that Shiʿi historical narratives are thus “hidden transcripts of resistance” that have become public.Footnote ¹⁵ Shiʿi narratives are indeed partially based on memories of subjugation and occupation, but they are also new creations of Shiʿi identity entrepreneurs. Examples of “new local historiographies,” Shiʿi local histories are generally written by nonprofessional historians with a personal connection to their subject matter and dealing with “small-scale identities” such as those of families, tribes, villages, or towns.Footnote ¹⁶

In contrast to many other examples of local historiography, however, most of the books by Saudi Shiʿi authors under discussion here were published outside of their local and national contexts and are officially banned by the government. In Saudi Arabia, one can purchase these books openly only at a large outdoor book market in Qatif, where banned Shiʿi religious and historical texts are sold. Due to the difficulty of finding these books in other parts of the country, many Saudi Sunni intellectuals and historians do not even know they exist. In late 2011, I visited al-Ahsa's main bookshop and publishing house, Maktabat al-Taʿawun al-Thaqafi, which is owned by a member of a Sunni family long resident in the area. The bookshop displays much of the historical literature written by Sunni authors on the Eastern Province,Footnote ¹⁷ but few works by Shiʿi authors. This absence may reflect the bookshop's attempt to meet the demands of its clientele, to promote its own books, or to satisfy concerns of the censors about local historiography. These concerns, by no means limited to Shiʿi histories, extend to tribal histories in particular, which can be politically sensitive for their revival of memories of earlier tribal conflict or their intensification of debates over the hierarchy and “purity” of tribal lineages—debates that may contradict genealogies legitimating the monarchy.Footnote ¹⁸ Although they have boomed in recent years, tribal histories, like their Shiʿi counterparts, are frequently banned.Footnote ¹⁹

THE PUSH TOWARD LOCAL HISTORIOGRAPHY: THE SHIRAZI CULTURAL PRODUCTION WING

In this article, I disentangle the different historical narratives of the three main Saudi Shiʿi political forces: the old elites (notable families); the leftists and nationalists since the 1950s and 1960s; and the Islamists since the 1970s. While many notables became leftist activists, the two categories of actors—notables and leftists—remain relatively distinct in the perception of Saudi Shiʿa. Due to the decline of the leftist movements and difficulties faced by the secular opposition in Saudi Arabia, Islamists have been the strongest political force in the Eastern Province since the second half of the 1970s. The authors in each category differ in terms of their implicit and at times explicit stances toward the Saudi state and the political status quo. Some seek to write the Shiʿa of al-Ahsa and Qatif into the Saudi historical imagination by emphasizing the Shiʿa's Arab and tribal descent and their peaceful submission in 1913 to ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Al Saʿud, also known as Ibn Saʿud. Others write separatist histories to “strengthen” Shiʿi identities vis-à-vis the identity of the Saudi state, of the tribes, or of Sunnis.

The boom in local historiography in Saudi Arabia since the mid-20th century can be explained by a range of factors, including a rise in literacy rates, the expansion of education, the introduction of history courses within Saudi universities, and the increasing willingness of publishers to print historical works. The first modern elementary schools were introduced in al-Ahsa in the early 1930s. However, it was leftist intellectuals educated in ARAMCO schools who composed the earliest local history works in the Eastern Province. The massive expansion of the Saudi university system in the wake of the 1970s oil boom as well as the mobilization of Saudi Shiʿa within Islamist movements beginning in the late 1970s prompted interest in the history of the Shiʿa as a distinct cultural group. In the 1980s, local historians began to rewrite the history of the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and since then they have published hundreds of books and founded several journals dedicated to this subject. These texts and my interviews with Saudi Shiʿi historians, most of which were carried out in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, and the United Kingdom between 2008 and 2011, form the basis of this article.

The earliest books on the political history of the Eastern Province were written by mid-20th-century Shiʿi and, to a lesser extent, Sunni intellectuals who had previously contributed historical writings to the emerging local press and clandestine leftist publications. These leftist and relatively secular historians sought to write nonseparatist histories of the Eastern Province by emphasizing commonality between Shiʿa and the rest of Saudi society and by de-emphasizing the coherence of the Shiʿa as a group, even though they did assign agency to the people of the region.

A more particularistic approach emerged through the writings of historians associated with the main Saudi Shiʿi Islamist opposition group, Munazzamat al-Thawra al-Islamiyya fi al-Jazira al-ʿArabiyya (Organization of the Islamic Revolution in the Arabian Peninsula). Established in 1975, this group came to be known locally as the Shirazi movement and its members and supporters as shīrāziyyūn after the group's Iranian/Iraqi spiritual leader, Muhammad Mahdi al-Shirazi. Although by the early 1990s the movement no longer formally existed, the term shīrāziyyūn has continued to be used to refer to its former members and supporters. The shīrāziyyūn led a failed uprising against the Saudi State in 1979–80 that forced them into exile, from where they published journals and pamphlets such as the monthly al-Thawra al-Islamiyya (The Islamic Revolution). In 1982, the editors of this journal began to include a page dedicated to history in each issue. The initial historical articles they published were mostly reappraisals of earlier historical accounts of the Saudi ruling family and the Eastern Province written by leftist opposition activists.Footnote ²⁰Al-Thawra al-Islamiyya also invoked the general importance of writing history.Footnote ²¹

In the mid-1980s, the Shirazi movement began to show increasing dedication to local history. A programmatic article in al-Thawra al-Islamiyya entitled “The Ignored Cultural Heritage” can be seen as the starting point of the Shirazi “cultural heritage” production program. The article opens by attacking the Saudi state for suppressing Shiʿi history and culture and for disseminating its own version of the country's history in schools—a version, the author asserts, that the Shiʿa must counter. It goes on to ask what happened to the historical legacy of writers, clerics, and poets from the region. The author ultimately calls for the establishment of organizations that will preserve this legacy through the publication of books, an endeavour he encourages readers to support through donations.Footnote ²²

The Shirazi movement soon began to dedicate more resources to the publication of historical texts. It sought to encourage historical narratives for Shiʿa in the Eastern Province that accounted for their religious and cultural life and their socioeconomic condition. In 1987, the Shirazi movement established the Muʾassasat al-Baqiʿ li-Ihyaʾ al-Turath (al-Baqiʿ Foundation for the Revival of Heritage), the cultural production wing of the movement whose purpose was to gather documents and manuscripts about Shiʿi history in Eastern Arabia and make them available for publication. The foundation derived its name from the al-Baqiʿ cemetery in Medina, where many figures important to Islamic history, some of whom the Shiʿa revere as imams, are buried. The Saudi state's destruction of the tombs over their graves in 1926 was the subject of articlesFootnote ²³ and books published by the foundation.Footnote ²⁴ The al-Baqiʿ Foundation also published historical works, including several discussed in this article. Between the late 1980s and 1993, its office was located above the Husayniyat al-Zahra in Sayyida Zaynab, a largely Shiʿi suburb of Damascus where the shīrāziyyūn had a strong presence. The foundation used the office as an organizational hub and a base to collect Shiʿi historical sources. The entrance to the Husayniyya was adorned with images of important Shiʿi scholars from al-Ahsa and Qatif.Footnote ²⁵

Most of the historical works published in the 1980s and early 1990s were written by activists in exile in Iran, Syria, and the United Kingdom. Many of these activists returned to Saudi Arabia through an amnesty deal with the government in 1993, after which they continued to write books on local history. Yet these books still had to be published outside of the country. Large Shiʿi printing houses in Beirut such as Dar al-Mahajja al-Baydaʾ printed a number of them.

Several of these Shirazi historians founded two journals wholly dedicated to local history. In 1995, opposition activists Hamza al-Hasan and Fuʾad Ibrahim, who had returned to Saudi Arabia after the 1993 agreement but later left again due to a lack of significant change in the situation of Saudi Shiʿa, established al-Waha (the Oasis) in London (with the aid of their fellow activists ʿAli al-Shuwaykhat and Muhammad al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia). The idea behind al-Waha was, according to Hamza al-Hasan, to “strengthen the identity” of the people in the Eastern Province and to “create a culture” based not only on religion but also on a shared history that would be viable for indigenous Sunni Muslims as well. After several years, Muhammad al-Nimr took over the editorship of the journal and moved it to Saudi Arabia.Footnote ²⁶

In 2007, the Shirazi cleric and historian Habib Al Jumayʿ, who had returned to Saudi Arabia from exile in Syria following the 1993 agreement, founded the second journal, al-Sahil (the Coast). Al-Sahil discusses similar topics as al-Waha but also features articles by non-Shiʿi academics as well as translations of articles and primary sources related to the history of the Eastern Province from Western languages and Ottoman Turkish into Arabic. The journal is published by Muʾassasat li-Ihyaʾ al-Turath al-Shiʿi fi al-Jazira al-ʿArabiyya (Foundation for the Revival of Shiʿi Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula), also founded by Al Jumayʿ.Footnote ²⁷ As part of his almost encyclopaedic attempt to collect all things by and about Saudi Shiʿa, Al Jumayʿ compiled an extensive three-volume bibliography of writings by Saudi Shiʿi authors on topics ranging from history to religious studies to natural science.Footnote ²⁸

Local Shiʿa are the primary audience of this Saudi Shiʿi historiography, though other Saudis and foreign academics occasionally read it as well. In many cases, the audience includes the wider Shiʿi world, which has limited knowledge of Saudi Shiʿa. The collective identities of subnational groups such as Saudi Shiʿa are constructed similarly to national identities through the “creation of culture.”Footnote ²⁹ In fact, Shiʿi and nationalist historiography share several common features: an interest in “origins”; an awareness of “threats”; and an emphasis on resistance to foreign interference or occupation, on decline and resurgence, on golden ages, and on shared group character. Moreover, both local and national historical narratives are created and reproduced with a desire to use the past to make claims in the present and for the future.Footnote ³⁰ Upsurges in local history writing are often also responses to historical trauma or experiences of exile. A striking example is the publication of hundreds of Palestinian histories about villages that were largely destroyed between 1947 and 1949.Footnote ³¹ Many Shiʿi village histories focus on life in the pre-oil era or in old towns and city centers that were destroyed in the last decades or are decaying. To take one example, after the 1979 uprising in Qatif led by the shīrāziyyūn, the Saudi state bulldozed Qatif's old city and turned it into a car park. Nostalgic histories of life in the old city are attempts to come to terms with this structural violence.

THE UNIFIED LANDS OF BAHRAIN: FORMULATING A NATIVIST MYTH

Many Saudi Shiʿi authors start their accounts of Eastern Arabia before the 7th-century advent of Islam in order to highlight the long history of human settlement in the area. In recounting this long history, they link ancient settlements to modern Shiʿi settlements. For example, some authors have linked the ancient village of Zara, which by the 4th century had become the seat of a Persian governor, to the village of Awwamiyya, a hotspot of Shiʿi opposition politics.Footnote ³² The shīrāziyyūn used the alleged ancient origins of Awwamiyya in their revolutionary discourse to try to establish it as an archetypal revolutionary Shiʿi village.Footnote ³³

The main component of Shiʿi writings on the ancient history of Eastern Arabia is the notion of the unified lands of Bahrain. Since pre-Islamic times, the name “Bahrain” has designated the coastal areas of the Persian Gulf between Basra and Qatar. The center of ancient Bahrain lay in the archipelago of modern Bahrain and the oases of Qatif and al-Ahsa. The political unity between the mainland and the islands of Bahrain persisted for much of the 9th to 15th centuries under different rulers, including the Qarmatians. Evan after this unity was destroyed in the 15th century, social, familial, and religious links persisted.Footnote ³⁴ Contemporary Shiʿi authors depict the period from the 9th to the 15th century as the golden age of the Shiʿa of Eastern Arabia, effectively formulating a “Bahraini Nativism.”Footnote ³⁵

Nativist Shiʿi histories relate that the lands of ancient Bahrain were unified in 899 when Abu Saʿid al-Jannabi conquered Qatif and established the Qarmatian Ismaʿili state, which later became known for its radical egalitarianism.Footnote ³⁶ The most notorious event during the Qarmatian period was the Qarmatian forces’ attack on Mecca in 930, in which they killed many local inhabitants and transferred the black stone of the Kaʿba to al-Ahsa. After the payment of a high ransom, the black stone was returned to Mecca in 951. This event still resonates today. Some Sunni historians associate present-day Shiʿa with the Qarmatians and thus implicitly with the desecration of the Kaʿba. For example, in the introduction of her doctoral dissertation, a female descendant of the Bin Jiluwi branch of the Al Saʿud ruling family, which held the governorship of the Eastern Province between 1913 and 1984/85, argues that the rawāfiḍ (or “rejectionists,” as she calls the Shiʿa) were successors of the Qarmatians who robbed the Kaʿba.Footnote ³⁷ In a similar vein, other Sunni historians praise the “Revolution of ʿAbd Allah b. ʿAli al-ʿUyuni against the Qarmatians” in the second half of the 11th century, which led to the defeat of the Qarmatian dynasty.Footnote ³⁸ Likely in attempt to avoid association with the theft of the Kaʿba, Shiʿi Islamist authors, particularly those associated with the shīrāziyyūn, tend not to focus on the history of the Qarmatians.

Meanwhile, leftist historians draw on the Qarmatian period to invent a socialist historical memory of Eastern Arabia. Historians associated with the Marxist-Leninist al-Hizb al-Dimuqrati al-Shaʿbi fi al-Jazira al-ʿArabiyya (Popular Democratic Party in the Arabian Peninsula), which had members (including some Shiʿa) across Saudi Arabia, glorify the Qarmatians as a “revolutionary movement” due to their land reforms and independence from outside forces.Footnote ³⁹ The Saudi Shiʿi historian Muhammad al-Muslim, author of one of the first histories of Qatif, discusses the Qarmatian dynasty as an example of an independent state in Eastern Arabia.Footnote ⁴⁰ His Sahil al-Dhahab al-Aswad (Coast of Black Gold) is perhaps the most well-known book among Saudi Shiʿa, who claim the author was imprisoned after its publication in the early 1960s due to its open discussion of the origins of and discrimination against the Shiʿa of Eastern Arabia.Footnote ⁴¹ Saudi Arabia maintains a ban on the book and prevented al-Muslim from traveling abroad for decades after his release from prison.Footnote ⁴² Al-Muslim's positive account of the Qarmatians is echoed in other books by Saudi ShiʿaFootnote ⁴³ and in the journal al-Waha, which has published articles on, for example, the progressive role of women in Qarmatian society.Footnote ⁴⁴

From the late 11th to the mid-16th century, local tribal dynasties ruled the lands of Bahrain, with their capital either on the island of Bahrain or in Qatif or al-Ahsa. Until the early 14th century, the tribal dynasties in al-Ahsa were Sunni. At some later point, many locals converted to Twelver Shiʿism, though the question of when is hotly debated. The riches of the Persian Gulf's Arab coast, with its undersea pearl fields, date gardens, and spice trade, as well as its strategic location along the caravan route from the Persian Gulf to Mecca, ensured that the nascent European empires would attempt to subdue the region. In 1515, the Portuguese took Hormuz; five years later, a joint Portuguese-Hormuzi naval force conquered Qatif and Bahrain. The establishment of a Portuguese garrison marked the start of seventy-five years of European domination over the lands of Bahrain.Footnote ⁴⁵ While Bahrain came under Safavid rule in 1602, further strengthening Shiʿism on the island, Qatif and al-Ahsa encountered different rulers who were hostile to Shiʿism.Footnote ⁴⁶ As the historian al-Muslim put it: “the Island of Awwal, which is nowadays called Bahrain, was separated in its political history from its sisters al-Ahsa and Qatif.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Both leftist and Islamist historians hold up instances of local resistance against the Portuguese and later the Ottomans as models for contemporary political struggles. Some of their writings are part of a nativist, even separatist, trend in Shiʿi historiography whereby authors appropriate vocabulary from Arab nationalist discourse. For example, ʿAbd al-Hadi al-Fadli, a prominent cleric and professor of Arabic belonging to a family hailing from al-Ahsa, praises the “thawra” (revolution) of the families of Qatif against the Christian Portuguese as a movement of “national liberation” (al-taḥarrur al-waṭanī) that “originates from the strong links of the sons of Qatif to their homeland (waṭan), and from their natural right to govern their homeland.”Footnote ⁴⁸

For other examples of “cultural resistance,” local Shiʿi historians draw on Jaʿfar bin Muhammad al-Khatti al-Qatifi's (ca. 1570–1619) poetry criticizing the Ottomans, whose initial period of rule over al-Ahsa lasted from the mid-16th century to 1670. In the introduction to his two-volume diwān of al-Khatti's work, the leftist author ʿAdnan al-ʿAwwami emphasizes the political aspects of his writings in order to portray him as a nationalist poet. Analyzing al-Khatti's poetry, al-ʿAwwami employs terms popularized by Arab nationalist discourse, such as “waṭan” (homeland) and “thuwwār” (revolutionaries). Most importantly, the homeland invoked by al-ʿAwwami is not contemporary Saudi Arabia but rather ancient Bahrain or the area of Qatif itself. Emphasizing al-Khatti's “longing for the homeland” and use of the local dialect, al-ʿAwwami turns him into a symbol of contemporary Qatifi social and political struggle.Footnote ⁴⁹

DEBATES ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF SHIʿISM IN EASTERN ARABIA

The origins of Shiʿism in Eastern Arabia are hotly debated between Shiʿi and Sunni intellectuals in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region. Most Shiʿi narratives suggest that the Shiʿa largely originate from Arab tribes that became sedentary; meanwhile, popular Sunni narratives often suggest that the Shiʿa were originally nontribal or foreign, usually Persian or Iraqi.Footnote ⁵⁰ Many Shiʿi accounts of the Shiʿa in al-Ahsa, Qatif, and Bahrain trace their lineage to the partially Christian ʿAbd al-Qays tribe, which penetrated Bahrain and Qatif in the 6th century. Branches of this tribe participated in the early Muslim conquests and espoused the cause of ʿAli. Shiʿi authors such as Fuʾad Ibrahim advocate this theory of descent in order to counter claims that Shiʿism was introduced to the region through the Qarmatians, who, as mentioned above, are generally scorned in Saudi Arabia.Footnote ⁵¹ Hamza al-Hasan has written, for example, that “Shiʿism in the area is . . . fourteen centuries old.”Footnote ⁵² Al-Hasan mentions the Qarmatians only sparingly and never identifies them as Shiʿa. His focus is instead on the later ʿUyunids who ruled the area until the 13th century with a few interruptions. Designating the ʿUyunids as Shiʿa, al-Hasan argues that it was under their rule that most of the inhabitants of the area converted to Twelver Shiʿism.Footnote ⁵³ There seems to be a link between the Ismaʿili Sevener Shiʿism of the Qarmatians and Twelver Shiʿism, even though few religiously inclined Twelver Shiʿi historians like to draw attention to it, partly because of doctrinal differences between Ismaʿilis and Twelver Shiʿa.Footnote ⁵⁴

Another wave of conversion occurred during the 14th century, when the Shiʿi Jarwanids ruled the lands of Bahrain. This wave contributed to the emergence of a caste of local Shiʿi clerics who subscribed to the uṣūlī school of Shiʿism.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, undercurrents of unorthodox Shiʿi folk beliefs and practices seem to have persisted, evidenced by a number of famous Shiʿi Sufis who lived in the area during this period.Footnote ⁵⁶ Mainstream Saudi historians such as ʿAbd Allah al-ʿUthaymin emphasize that the Shiʿi Jarwanid era was an exception in the political history of the Eastern Province. Since the advent of Islam, they stress, all of the rulers of the Eastern Province have been Sunni apart from the Qarmatians and the Jarwanids.Footnote ⁵⁷

An insistence on the Shiʿa's Arab and tribal descent is common to all Saudi Shiʿi historical narratives. For example, in his village history of Awwamiyya, the Shirazi historian Zaki ʿAli al-Salih argues that most of its inhabitants are descendents of Arab tribes from other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The rest, he contends, are descendents of families from Bahrain, since families from Qatif settled in Bahrain and Bahrainis settled on the mainland.Footnote ⁵⁸ The Shirazi cleric Fawzi al-Sayf highlights this ancient history and the tribal origin of the Shiʿa in a booklet with the indicative title, Shiʿat al-Qatif wa-l-Ahsaʾ: ʿAraqat al-Madi wa-Tatallaʿat al-Mustaqbal (Shiʿa of Qatif and al-Ahsa: Deep-Rootedness of the Past and Aspirations for the Future).Footnote ⁵⁹

Shiʿi descriptions of the Bani Khalid tribe, which for centuries was among the most powerful tribes in Eastern Arabia and in the 1670s expelled the Ottomans from al-Ahsa, also focus on tribal conversion to Shiʿism. Authors such as Hamza al-Hasan argue that although the Bani Khalid tribe assumed power through violence, parts of the tribe soon began to live amongst the Shiʿa, become sedentary, and in some cases adopt Shiʿism,Footnote ⁶⁰ a process said to have intensified after the defeat of the Bani Khalids at the hands of the Al Saʿud in the 18th century.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless, the majority of the Bani Khalid tribe—especially its ruling branches—remained Sunni, which may have been a strategy for maintaining a symbolic religious boundary between themselves and the society they ruled.Footnote ⁶² Importantly, while Shiʿi authors agree on the link between the Shiʿa and the Bani Khalid tribe, Sunni histories of the Bani Khalid tribe do not mention it.Footnote ⁶³

Another genre of local historiography—Shiʿi family histories—often connects the lineage of particular Shiʿi families to a noble tribe. For example, historiography on the Abu Khamsin family, one of al-Ahsa's most prominent Shiʿi clerical and business families, claims that it came from Najd and settled in al-Ahsa in the period of Bani Khalid rule. This attempt to connect the family to a tribe is unsurprising since tribal Arab descent is an important form of social capital in Saudi Arabia.Footnote ⁶⁴ The same is true of religious learning. In Saudi Arabia, as in Shiʿi contexts elsewhere, a pious genealogy can be transformed and used for contemporary political aims.Footnote ⁶⁵ A branch of the extended al-Nimr family from al-Ahsa and Dammam, for example, recently claimed to have discovered a new genealogical link to the Prophet Muhammad. They added the term “sayyid” to their name, indicating their direct descent from the Prophet. While this was probably intended to boost the social standing of the family within the Shiʿi community, it ultimately caused controversy.Footnote ⁶⁶

Another example is furnished by a book on the al-Khars family authored by Muhammad al-Khars, a member of the family from al-Ahsa. Al-Khars spent years researching the history of his family in order to uncover a tribal lineage for it. In the book, he claims that his ancestors were relatives of the Al Saʿud, and specifically the Sudayris, for long the most powerful branch of the ruling family. This tribal lineage, in his view, increases not only his family's legitimacy but also the legitimacy of Shiʿa from al-Ahsa as a whole. As he puts it, “[w]ith this book I wanted to prove that Shiʿa had always been here and are therefore entitled to their rights. It is important to show that we are in the tribal system, that we have a strong tribal lineage.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Genealogy and religious scholarship are also the focus of biographical dictionaries of clerics and leading personalities, a popular genre amongst clerics. Yusuf al-Bahrani's (1695–1772) biographical dictionary is among the earliest of its kind to include clerics from al-Ahsa and Qatif.Footnote ⁶⁸ Another early work in this genre was composed by ʿAli al-Biladi al-Bahrani al-Qudayhi (d. 1921), probably the first local scholar to write about the history of the Shiʿa of Qatif and al-Ahsa.Footnote ⁶⁹ Al-Biladi was himself the focus of a book by Hasan al-Saffar, the spiritual leader of the shīrāziyyūn, who argued that the author should serve as an inspiration to Shiʿa to revive their historical and cultural legacy.Footnote ⁷⁰ Finally, the monumental description (in partly diary form) of daily events in mid-20th-century Qatif by the local historian and Qatifi cleric Faraj al-ʿUmran contains recorded oral histories of and biographical information on many clerics from the area.Footnote ⁷¹ The shīrāziyyūn credited al-ʿUmran's writings with spreading religion in the villages and strengthening the “cultural movement” amongst the Shiʿa. They argued that the authorities banned his writings and gave him trouble because, in their words, “a book was more dangerous than a weapon.”Footnote ⁷²

Shiʿi notable families were the traditional intermediaries between the state and Shiʿi communities. They based their prominence on access to the rulers, but also on landownership, wealth, and clerical rank and religious scholarship.Footnote ⁷³ Due to the importance of clerical rank and religious scholarship in particular, some notables—including the Shiʿi former judge from Qatif ʿAbd Allah al-KhunayziFootnote ⁷⁴ and othersFootnote ⁷⁵—have published widely on the history of Qatifi notable families and their clerics.Footnote ⁷⁶ Other authors focus on the history of clerics of a particular village or region.Footnote ⁷⁷ A work on the clerics of al-Ahsa is especially interesting because its compiler was a former leader of a Saudi Shiʿi Islamist group distinct from the Shirazi movement called Khat al-Imam (The Line of the Imam), a name that refers to followers of the line of Imam Khomeini. In the late 1980s, members of this group became the nucleus of the pro-Iranian Saudi Shiʿi militant group, Hizbullah al-Hijaz. In its official propaganda publications, Hizbullah al-Hijaz occasionally mentioned the legacy of Shiʿi scholars in Saudi Arabia and described the history of villages where it retained particularly strong support.Footnote ⁷⁸ Overall, however, it did not put as much weight as the shīrāziyyūn on historiography.

Khat al-Imam was founded in the 1970s by a group of Saudi students at Najaf's Hawza ʿIlmiyya (Territory of Learning), the main center of Shiʿi religious scholarship at the time. Among these students was Hashim al-Shakhs, who sought to inscribe the clerical history of his native al-Ahsa into both the domestic and the pan-Shiʿi historical imagination. Al-Shakhs’ focus on the Shiʿi clerical tradition of al-Ahsa had two purposes: to counterbalance the preponderant literature that already existed on the history of Sunnis in al-Ahsa; and to advance the idea of wilāyat al-faqīh (guardianship of the jurisprudent) according to which the Shiʿa should be led politically by clerics.Footnote ⁷⁹

Interestingly, al-Shakhs discusses unorthodox forms of Shiʿi beliefs, such as Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi's teachings, as a sort of local Shiʿi heritage.Footnote ⁸⁰ Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi (1753–1826) was born in a village in al-Ahsa but rose to fame only after leaving for Iraq and then Iran. In Iran, he founded a mystical Shiʿi movement that later came to be called the shaykhiyya, which sought to revolutionize Shiʿi jurisprudence and scholarship. Most mainstream Shiʿi scholars in the centers of Shiʿi learning in Iraq, who at that time were already following the uṣūlī school of Shiʿi jurisprudence, regarded his teachings as a form of heresy. From a dogmatic point of view, it is striking that al-Ahsaʾi and his legacy retain such a prominent place in historical writings by uṣūlī Saudi Shiʿa. The journals al-Waha and al-Sahil have published many articles on his life, writings, and impact on religious thought in Qatif and al-Ahsa.Footnote ⁸¹

OCCUPATION OR UNIFICATION? COMPETING NARRATIVES ABOUT THE SAUDI CONQUESTS

In the local historiography of Eastern Arabia, particularly fierce debates surround the era of the first Saudi conquests in the mid-18th century. Accounts by mainstream Saudi historians often focus on the struggle between the Al Saʿud and the Bani Khalid as well as on other tribal conflicts.Footnote ⁸² These historians use the word “tawḥīd” (unification) to describe the Saudi conquest of the territories adjacent to Najd. Use of this term became widespread in official historiography and, since the 1980s, in schoolbooks and the National Museum in Riyadh, replacing earlier expressions such as “conquest” and “expansion.”Footnote ⁸³ Meanwhile, Shiʿi authors such as Hamza al-Hasan use the term “iḥtilāl” (conquest) to refer to the Saudi conquests, and emphasize the violence that Saudi forces perpetrated against the Shiʿa,Footnote ⁸⁴ including the burning of Shiʿi libraries containing thousands of manuscripts and documents.Footnote ⁸⁵ The latter historical trauma led the Shiʿa to hide their books and historical documents in walls or caves under their houses and partly explains contemporary Shiʿi authors’ emphasis on Shiʿi heritage and the history of the region.Footnote ⁸⁶

The state-sponsored historiography of the first Saudi conquest is important for our purposes because it justifies the conquests by referencing the “reclamation” of al-Ahsa and Qatif. For example, ʿAbd Allah al-ʿUthaymin's first justification for the “unification of al-Ahsa and Qatif” with Najd is the fact that the area was under Saudi rule for part of the 18th and 19th centuries.Footnote ⁸⁷ When the British political agent in Kuwait Captain William Shakespear visited Ibn Saʿud in 1911, the latter sought to discuss the British attitude toward Ottoman rule over al-Ahsa and Qatif and a possible Saudi attack on these areas. One of Ibn Saʿud's main legitimizations for conquering al-Ahsa and Qatif was that they were part of “ancestral property” of the Al Saʿud. Ibn Saʿud argued that he had been in contact with the other princes of Arabia and that “the responsible Arabs in Hasa and Katif” were begging him to drive the “Turks” out.Footnote ⁸⁸ He restated these claims in the spring of 1913, arguing that both the British in 1865 and the Ottomans after 1871 had granted the Al Saʿud the right to administer the region.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a 1913 interview, Ibn Saʿud again argued that notables and clerics from al-Ahsa and Qatif had sought his help in countering menacing tribes and corrupt Ottoman officials.Footnote ⁹⁰ In a letter to the British consul-general in Bushire, he claimed that “we have now-a-days conquered the country of our fathers and grand fathers (viz.) El Hasa and El Qatif as well as their dependencies.”Footnote ⁹¹ According to Nakash, “his move on Hasa and Qatif is presented as a holy war against Shiʿi heretics, who cooperated with foreign imperialists to weaken Islam and as a response to the sad plight of the people.”Footnote ⁹² Consequently, when Ibn Saʿud arrived in Qatif, he dictated four terms to the Qatifis, one of them being “that the residents should affirm in writing that the place belonged to the ancestors of [Ibn Saʿud].”Footnote ⁹³

Accordingly, the historical claims over al-Ahsa and Qatif on which Ibn Saʿud based his conquest became important in Saudi historiography. This political use of history prompted Shiʿi authors to compose their own historical narratives to serve as counterclaims.

THE OTTOMANS, BADŪ-ḤAḌAR CONFRONTATIONS, AND THE POLITICS OF NOTABLES

Three topics dominate Shiʿi historiography of 19th-century al-Ahsa: the life stories of “Shiʿi martyrs”—that is, victims of tribal conquest; the cultural “renaissance” under Ottoman rule; and the political role of the notable families. The Shirazi historian and schoolteacher Muhammad al-Hirz has written much on the first of these topics.Footnote ⁹⁴ For example, he wrote a book published in 1993 about the poet ʿAli al-Ramadan (d. 1849) who was sentenced to death by a Wahhabi judge in al-Ahsa in 1848/49. Through the book, al-Hirz sought to show contemporary readers the similarities between past and present circumstances.Footnote ⁹⁵

These historiographical narratives of al-Ahsa also contrast Ottoman with Saudi rule. In the 19th century, the Ottomans, the Egyptians, the Al Saʿud, and the Bani Khalid all disputed al-Ahsa until the Ottomans established control over the region in 1871, a state of affairs that lasted until 1913. Historians at Saudi universities have written extensively on the political and administrative history of Ottoman rule in al-Ahsa, which they do not frame in particularly positive terms. Their view of the Ottoman period is shaped in part by the Saudi state narrative that it liberated al-Ahsa in 1913, following local resistance (muqāwama) against Ottoman rule.Footnote ⁹⁶

By contrast, Shiʿi narratives of Ottoman rule in al-Ahsa highlight the relative religious freedom and an inclusive political culture in which Shiʿi elites contributed to decision-making processes. Hamza al-Hasan credits the Ottomans for not imposing the Hanafi interpretation of Islam on the Shiʿi population and contrasts this with Wahhabi clerics’ introduction of restrictions. He argues that religious and intellectual freedoms led to “the cultural development of the region in the Turkish era.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Meanwhile, Muhammad al-ʿAwwami represents Shiʿi leaders who worked with the Ottomans and were opposed to the Saudi forces as national leaders and heroes.Footnote ⁹⁸

One of the main elements of this “intellectual renaissance” (al-nahḍa al-fikriyya), as al-Hasan calls it, was the system of religious schooling.Footnote ⁹⁹ Al-Ahsa and Qatif had been regional centers of both Sunni and Shiʿi religious learning for centuries. Yet local schools were just the starting point for young Shiʿi religious scholars, many of whom continued their studies in Iraq, Iran, and sometimes Bahrain only to return after extended time away.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The large number of clerics in Qatif led some to call it “Little Najaf.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

Yet the extent to which these positive Shiʿi historical narratives are accurate is unclear. The Ottomans were wary of Shiʿi Muslims in general and regarded them as potentially disloyal in some parts of the empire.Footnote ¹⁰² In addition, the political situation in 19th-century Eastern Arabia was far from stable due to frequent tribal raids.Footnote ¹⁰³ Indeed, pro-Saudi narratives justify Saudi rule over al-Ahsa and Qatif by arguing that it introduced security where previously insecurity had reigned. This official argument is also prevalent in the aforementioned doctoral dissertation by Jawahir bint ʿAbd al-Muhsin bin Jiluwi, entitled al-Awdaʿ al-Amniyya fi al-Mintaqa al-Sharqiyya (The Security Situation in the Eastern Province). The basic premise of the dissertation is that Ottoman rule could not provide security by keeping Bedouin raids to a minimum, leading the inhabitants to “search for a centralized power represented in Saudi rule.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Even some Shiʿi notables have argued that because the area was so insecure, Saudi rule was the only available option. This claim has incited fierce discussions that revolve around the Sharba Battle between tribesmen and inhabitants of Qatif in the summer of 1908. British officials in Bahrain attributed the bloody confrontations to the “ill-feeling between the townspeople in Katif and the Bedouin” after the Qatifis refused to allow the Bedouins “to enter the tribal date groves for the collection of their supplies of the date fruits.” In response, as many as 2,000 Bedouins “commenced by making inroads into the date-gardens and killing Bahranis (Shias of Katif) by twos and threes. The latter joined in resistance but were several times beaten back, losing, it is said, 30 to 50 men killed each time.” In addition, it was said that dozens of Qatifi pearl divers were slaughtered at sea, twenty-eight villages and thousands of date trees were burnt down, and about 800 Qatifis fled to Bahrain.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The British feared that the Bedouins might eventually massacre all Shiʿi inhabitants of the villages.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Translations of British documents pertaining to the Sharba Battle form the basis of a special edition of al-Waha, which presents the battle as one of countless conflicts between the residents of Qatif and the tribes: “The Sharba Battle is the name for the war that occurred between the sedentary population (al-ḥaḍar) and the Bedouins in Qatif.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ By invoking the badū-ḥaḍar dichotomy, the editors draw upon a recurrent theme in Saudi Shiʿi writings and a politicized issue in Saudi Arabia more broadly. Madawi al-Rasheed argues that Shiʿa “experienced discrimination not only on the basis of their faith and practices, but also on the basis of their livelihood (farming and sedentarization).” As a counter measure, Saudi Shiʿa's historiographical writings invoke Ibn Khaldun to associate sedentary populations with civilization and Bedouins with “barbarism and savagery.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In his al-Waha editorial, Hamza al-Hasan discredits the local leadership, or notables, of his time by stating that the “feudalists” and merchants were suppressing peasants and farmers in cooperation with the Turkish governor. He describes them as cowards who looked after their own interests at the expense of the interests of the region. Therefore, “it was easy for King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz to convince the notables of his political legitimacy as a safeguard of security.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ These blunt accusations in the first issue of the journal clearly spelled out the editors’ view of the notables.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Al-Hasan's class analysis reflected earlier historiography by nonelite groups in the Arab Gulf States, which was inspired by Arab nationalism and sought to unite pearl divers, Shiʿi peasants, and the emerging middle class.Footnote ¹¹¹

In a later issue of al-Waha, ʿAbd al-Muhsin al-Khunayzi, a leftwing activist who came from a long line of prominent Shiʿi clerics and judges, published a refutation of this account of the Sharba Battle, which implicitly targeted his family.Footnote ¹¹² He highlights the important role played by notable families in the Sharba Battle as well as in several preceding battles between Shiʿa and Bedouins. For example, in the Jabal battle, ʿAbd al-Muhsin points out, Husayn bin ʿAli bin ʿAbd Allah al-Faraj,

According to oppositional Shiʿi authors, especially the shīrāziyyūn, the Shiʿi leadership made a historical error by accepting Saudi rule. Hamza al-Hasan, for instance, calls ʿAbd al-Husayn bin Jumʿa, who was publicly executed in 1914 for resisting the Saudi authorities, the “last political leader” (ākhir zaʿīm siyāsī).Footnote ¹¹⁴ Al-Hasan later published an entire book highlighting the failure of Shiʿi notable politics under Saudi rule.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Another author criticizes the Shiʿi leadership explicitly by calling the events of 1913 the “historical mistake of the leaders (zuʿamāʾ) of Qatif,” identifying three reasons for their failure to resist Ibn Saʿud: the absence of centralized political leadership; division amongst the clerics; and the absence of capable military leadership “to defend the homeland (waṭan).”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Other shīrāziyyūn have written books about historical personalities who in their view serve as revolutionary role models. For example, under a pseudonym, Fuʾad Ibrahim wrote a book about Hasan ʿAli al-Badr (1861/62–1925/26), one of the only advocates of resistance against Ibn Saʿud in 1913.Footnote ¹¹⁷ According to Ibrahim, his work was meant to highlight the political activism of al-Badr and “his reformative tendency as a mujtahid,” as well as to offer “implicit criticism of the passive, stagnant, and backward Shiʿi scholars in the Eastern Province.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Another historical figure invoked by the shīrāziyyūn was the cleric from Awwamiyya, Muhammad al-Nimr. Al-Nimr also opposed the 1913 agreement with Ibn Saʿud, and in 1929/30 he led an uprising against Saudi rule.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The shīrāziyyūn accused those who opposed him—the notable families—of treason. In particular, they blamed Shiʿi notables, such as the judge of Qatif ʿAli Abu ʿAbd al-Karim al-Khunayzi (1868/69–1943), for obstructing the uprising in order to safeguard their leadership and prestige.Footnote ¹²⁰

Shiʿi narratives have also been critical of the once governor of al-Ahsa, ʿAbd Allah bin Jiluwi (d. 1938), who was a close associate and cousin of Ibn Saʿud and a participant in his 1902 capture of Riyadh. In 1913, ʿAbd Allah bin Jiluwi was appointed governor of al-Ahsa. In contrast to the critical accounts of him in Shiʿi historiography, one of his descendants (whose PhD dissertation I discussed earlier) wrote a book in praise of him and his role in the formation of the Saudi state. She argues that the rule of ʿAbd Allah bin Jiluwi and his son Saʿud bin Jiluwi was characterized by justice and adherence to religious values, and that the seat of the governor had always been open to visitors.Footnote ¹²¹