The relationship between paper trails, urbanism and state power is a historiographical thread that runs through the scholarship on archives for several decades, from Angel Rama's influential The Lettered City to Matthew Hull's study of bureaucracy and urban development in Islamabad (Government of Paper, University of California Press, 2012).Footnote 1 Rosie Bsheer's ambitious Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia revisits this relationship from a different angle by examining the politics of cultural heritage, historical consciousness and memory in Saudi Arabia in the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Archive Wars succeeds in demonstrating institutional and discursive continuity between the making of historical archives in the Kingdom and major urban development projects in Riyad and Mecca.
As Bsheer convincingly shows, Al Saud's interest in developing archives and in reshaping the urban fabric of Riyad and Mecca (despite remarkable differences) were derived from a fairly coherent vision of Saudi history that certain members and branches within the ruling family promoted to legitimize their rule. Further, as Bsheer repeatedly argues throughout the book, this vision was “secular” in its emphasis of the role of the Al Saud family in the formation of the Kingdom while downplaying the role of ‘Abd al-Wahhab and the clerics. As has been the case in numerous other countries, the official narrative(s) was intended to silence, or at least marginalize, contending views of the past. In addition to legitimacy to rule and the promotion of the Saudi kingdom as a modern state, the various cultural heritage institutions and initiatives justified the massive lucrative development projects, most notably in the city of Mecca. Beyond their symbolism, these projects enriched a circle of beneficiaries that was closely associated with the Al Saud family.
Bsheer's narrative is based on parallels she draws between the processes of assembling official archives (chapters 2 and 3) and urban development projects (chapters 4 and 5): “The redevelopment of the Red Palace [the three-year home of King Saud], like the archival record and the material heritage, will silence the contentious life history of this second Saudi king” (p. 153); or “[p]lanning documents [. . .] are like archives, political devices for. The construction of the past through forms of present engineering” (p. 164); and “[t]oward the end of the twentieth century, the archive also came to include the built environment” (p. 165). To a considerable extent, these concrete and occasionally metaphorical parallels are illuminating as they highlight the interconnections between the development of cultural heritage institutions (like museums and archives) and urban development. Archive Wars offers a meticulous examination of these interconnections on the temporal, ideological, institutional and, to a significant extent, personal levels. The interconnections are also revealed in the opposition by individuals and factions in Saudi Arabia to some of these projects and their underlying logic.
Many of Bsheer's informants and official publications and sources foster a sense of coherence and continuity from the daily work of the archivist to the megaprojects in Mecca. Certainly, this sense of coherence merits its centrality in Archive Wars. Yet, one may wonder what this emphasis on continuity eludes. To be sure, Bsheer is aware of the messiness of archival work and urban planning. But one may further ask: where and how do the processing of an archival record and the planning of an urban center differ? Further, historiographically and ethnographically (as Bsheer's study is truly interdisciplinary), are the process of archive building and a redevelopment of a historical city equally visible beyond the declarations and public statements (the same question can be raised regarding the acquisition of a luxurious artifact or a significant/famous collection versus the accession of an ordinary, perhaps somewhat obscure, document)?
The quotidian, largely undocumented operation of cultural heritage institutions is particularly important when archives are interpreted as reflecting the intentionality of their founders. Archive Wars seems to be based on the assumption that cultural heritage workers are fully, or at least highly aware of the mission statements issued by the regime and the institution they serve. Occasionally, this may be the case, but the messiness of archival and cultural heritage work, in its most daily manifestations, often creates a disconnect between the actual treatment of a record and artifacts and the institutional mission statement. Moreover, archival records and cultural heritage artifacts assume new meaning in new contexts, but rarely do archives get reorganized in their entirety. In other words, the archive and its classifications often undermine their previous and current logics. Despite this messiness, archives and cultural heritage institutions tend to promote a narrative of order and intentionality. This narrative is often adopted by the critics of the archive. Without access to the archive's archive, it may be quite difficult to see these changes and the long shadow messiness casts in their fuller scale. The greater visibility of intentions in urban development project may be an outsider's illusion, but, historiographically, it may be easier to grasp the fuller scale of these projects.
As one of the very few monographs on the history of archives and cultural heritage in the Middle East, Archive Wars leaves its readers with much to reflect on. The questions the book raises and the honesty with which Bsheer addresses the difficulty of answering them in the context of Saudi Arabia should inform whoever is trying to understand and work with and against the region's archival grain.
