Introduction
The widespread support that the global heritage discourse enjoys across the world obscures the weak and uneven engagement that it has had with different regions and cultural traditions of the world. In this discussion, I focus on its relation to religious traditions and contexts, and how this impacts the study of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). What I address in this article is a perfect storm of misrepresentations that brings together two weaknesses inherent to the contemporary scope of a global heritage tradition: a tension between practices of preservation and religious traditions, in broad terms, and an absence of voices from the MENA region in the early histories of a global heritage discourse, which paved the way for a specific set of concerns and obstacles. Therefore the aims of this article are twofold, but centre on the deployment of a global heritage model. On the one hand, I argue that two forms of knowing and acting upon historic resources (a universal/secular and local/spiritual one) have not been acknowledged enough in the literature of contemporary and critical heritage studies. While that discussion revolves around the legacies of a discipline that privileges empirical and secular engagements with material culture, I consider the way in which a global preservation tradition stands at odds with the study and management of heritage associated with Muslim communities.
The scale that I selected for this discussion is, in some ways, arbitrary. This is not for a lack of rationale to examine the shared heritage histories of MENA but, rather, because this discussion can and should extend to many other regions of the broad and diverse Muslim world. However, MENA features prominently in the early years of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and, as a Muslim-majority region, also contains a rich stratigraphy of ‘Islamic’ and ‘Western’ monumental heritage in addition to a continuum of indigenous and cosmopolitan cultural production. In short, although only some, not all, challenges in heritage studies and preservation across this region are associated with religious traditions, the structural challenges that I raise here will help contextualize the limits set by a global heritage industry on the heritage assemblages of MENA. For the purposes of this discussion, I use ‘heritage’ not in its broadest extent to mean ‘tradition’, a more dynamic term which may exist in harmony with the practice of religion. Rather, I refer to a concept of heritage that is intimately attached to the practice of preservation: a ‘contemporary product shaped from history’ (Turnbridge and Ashworth Reference Turnbridge and Ashworth1996, 20). There are other regional and thematic approaches to preservation but, in this argument, I examine the specific impact that a recognition of a hegemonic and universalizing ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (Smith Reference Smith2006) has had on preservation practices across the Middle East and North Africa.
To give context and exemplify the concerns that I raise in this article, I draw from a popular reaction across English-language media and scholarship following the transformation of the iconic Hagia Sophia museum in Istanbul, Turkey, into a functioning mosque in mid-2020. A New York Times opinion piece in July 2020 exemplifies the emphasis that is encouraged by a global heritage discourse. It remarks on the detailed and complex politics that underpin the changes of the secular space back into a religious one, referring to the risk that it poses for the World Heritage Site as a point of reference for the ideal state of heritage significance. Meanwhile, UNESCO’s director general, Audrey Azoulay, announced that Hagia Sophia represents ‘a unique testimony to interactions between Europe and Asia over the centuries … a powerful symbol for dialogue’ (UNESCO 2020). This particular representation of the interactions between Europe and Asia as a dialectic engagement that exists in harmony is not quite reflective of the history of heritage interventions at the site. While journalists and professionals alike tout the 1972 World Heritage Convention of UNESCO as a benchmark for custodianship, less effort was put into examining the politics and histories behind the designation of Hagia Sophia as a ‘secular space’. At the turn of the 20th century, a formative period for the emergence of a global preservation ideology, monumental sites such as the Hagia Sophia emerged in Western consciousness as icons of Christendom and Western civilization. Erik Goldstein, professor of international relations and history at Boston University, describes how anti-Muslim sentiment at the time was coded, not too conspicuously, in European expert assessments of the state of conservation of this specific monument (Goldstein Reference Goldstein2011). In his work, he describes how Swiss architect Gaspare Fossati, charged with the restoration of the building by the Sultan in 1846, reported unfavorably on ‘the negligence of the Moslem officials’ (ibid., 48). This expert condemnation reverberated across the heritage elites in Europe. The cause of rallying for the ‘safeguarding’ of this monument was taken up by William Morris in the UK, who was founder of the influential Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) and active in anti-Turkish politics. The work of SPAB is a staple in the genealogy of the field of conservation and, as such, its work primed a global heritage-safeguarding consciousness that eventually informed UNESCO’s concern with cultural heritage. Considering the influential position of SPAB for the emergence of a global heritage preservation tradition, Goldstein argues that the negative discourse attached to SPAB’s patronage of Hagia Sophia contributed to fuelling a public movement to have the building placed in Christian hands, in alignment with Britain’s interest in liberating Christian holy places. Therefore the romanticized 80-year span of harmonious history, which includes its designation as a museum and international monument in 1935 by the secular Republic of Turkey, is, in fact, a history of neutralization of its spiritual functions. Erdoğan’s transfer of control of the Byzantine monument to the Directorate of Religious Affairs, who then issued a decree to open the site for Muslim prayer, is not the first time that politics and religion have coalesced to transform the uses of the site, and it will not be the last. But this tension, and the way in which it was addressed by the media and UNESCO alike, highlight the ease with which religious tradition can be, for lack of a better word, switched on and off in the histories and politics of preservation intervention.
Reacting to the discourse surrounding this recent case study, I suggest that institutions and experts of a global heritage preservation industry are able to easily mobilize a very selective politicization of religious authority. The case study above highlights the effectivity of a secularist rhetoric that an organization such as UNESCO leverages in order to position itself above religious and sectarian disagreements for the purposes of brokering conflict and in alignment with its dialectical aspirations. I am, therefore, concerned with examining the transformations that other sites across the Muslim world may be subjected to. In the first part of this discussion, I examine the ideological context that dictates a specific treatment of the heritage of religious traditions to argue that the place of religious traditions and practices in a history of global heritage preservation is simultaneously and strategically made visible and invisible. It is made visible through the high frequency with which religion is featured in tensions and even conflicts between the aims and forms of authority of heritage preservationists and those of practitioners of religious traditions. I have argued elsewhere that the MENA region, and Islam more generally, feature disproportionally under the rubric of religious-led and other conflict in the literature of heritage and preservation studies (Rico and Lababidi Reference Rico and Lababidi2017; see also Elias Reference Elias2007; Flood Reference Flood2002). On the other hand, the voices of religious traditions are rendered invisible due to the marginal attention that religion has received in the historiography of the field, with notable, but few, exceptions, such as the work of Denis Byrne, who has been calling for a reconsideration of secularism in international heritage discourses for the better part of the last three decades (Byrne Reference Byrne1995; Reference Byrne2004; Reference Byrne2014). As an example, take two key publications that have charted the historiography of a critical or discursive heritage turn in the field, and that are used extensively for teaching: Laurajane Smith’s Uses of heritage (2006), and Rodney Harrison’s Heritage. Critical approaches (2013). While these volumes recognize that religion is one of the forms of authority that can give shape to heritage value, their engagement with religious traditions is contained by the (important) work of identifying a general marginalization of ‘otherness’ in heritage practice by the hands of global, institutional or hegemonic discourses and apparatus. However, the specific historical and political contexts and the instruments through which religion is made invisible are not addressed in detail in these popular volumes. If there is something that can be learned from Goldstein’s examination of Hagia Sophia, beyond the specificity of Turkish identity politics, it is the need to shed light on the ideologies that gave shape to a canonical history of global-preservation studies. In the second part of this article, therefore, I propose a reconsideration of historical narratives that contextualize the discipline, focusing on the involvement of the MENA region in early global heritage preservation debates. Finally, I propose avenues for reconsidering the representation of heritage in the region, with specific attention to the erasure of religious traditions in the study and management of heritage resources.
Heritage and religious traditions
Histories of the emergence of a global heritage discourse in the literature of heritage studies are so homogeneous that they practically need no introduction. With a focus on the place of heritage preservation in Western traditions, the canonical The past is a foreign country (Lowenthal Reference Lowenthal1998) identifies the point of origin and catalyst for a global heritage sensibility in the ashes of the Second World War, and a time of intense and strategic international cooperation (cf. Meskell Reference Meskell2018). Ideological legacies from previous centuries, such as the positivist rationalism that made conservation an expert-led scientific pursuit through the 19th and early 20th centuries, are emphasized in most historical backgrounds, although these remain primarily centred on European heritage traditions. More recently, scholars in critical heritage studies (Byrne Reference Byrne2019; Karlstrom Reference Karlström2013) as well as religion (Rots Reference Rots2019) have intensified the examination of the ideological tensions that revolve around a heritage of religious traditions, calling attention to the specific impact of post-Enlightenment thinking on the historical emergence and contemporary operation of heritage preservation. However, recent examinations of the specific history (and prehistory) of UNESCO (Meskell Reference Meskell2018; Hall Reference Hall2011) and the political and social context for the expression of religious traditions across Europe (e.g. Sherman Reference Sherman1999; Teryukova Reference Teryukova2014) suggest that the disciplinary expertise, political ideology and religiosity of the early interlocutors and institutions invested in a global heritage discourse left a mark on the eventual operation of the World Heritage Committee.
David Lowenthal (Reference Lowenthal1998) summarizes the ways in which heritage value as an object of study was shaped by the rise of secularism starting in the 16th-century Reformation, giving rise to secular and materialistic practices of remembrance. This shift saw the ideological resistance to the Catholic Church manifest in a world view that differentiated and compartmentalized distinct spheres of science and religion: a European secular rationalism that, Denis Byrne (Reference Byrne2014, 6) argues, would eventually provide a foundation for the emergence of archaeological and heritage discourses. In France, which would later become ground zero for the emergence of global heritage discourse, a long and influential process of de-Christianization during the Revolution and the rise of the Republic (1789–99) resulted in dramatic changes to the way in which the very materiality of religious traditions was preserved in the built landscape. Changes included the removal of plates, statues and other fittings from places of worship; the destruction of crosses, bells, shrines and other ‘external signs of worship’; and the closure of churches (Tallet and Atkin Reference Tallet and Atkin1991). The rise of heritage concerns here is associated with a ‘secular sacralization’ of cultural goods from the 18th century to the 20th, intended to implement new intellectual rituals that created a form of civil spirituality (Isnart and Cerezales Reference Isnart, Cerezales, Isnart and Cerezales2020, 2–3; see also Sherman Reference Sherman1989). These shifts set the ground for a heritage preservation field that is centred on specific curatorial practices: a reliance on measurement and precision, a dominant concern with the visual and tangible aspects of heritage (Byrne Reference Byrne2007), an emphasis on visual technologies of capture and representation (Brusius and Dukelgrün Reference Brusius and Dukelgrün2016; Hamilakis and Ifantidis 2015; Shanks and Svabo Reference Shanks, Svabo and Gonzáles-Ruibal2013), and the establishment of a listing and hierarchizing apparatus (Rico Reference Rico, Lafrenz-Samuels and Rico2015; Harrison Reference Harrison, Vidal and Dias2016). In this context, the global or institutional discourse for heritage emerged and thrived from the late 1940s with the rise of UNESCO’s work, further standardizing approaches to heritage preservation across the globe.
Therefore I argue that the interrelated agendas of religion and politics shaped the ideological trajectory of preservation away and isolated from a productive engagement with sacred and religious heritage. I join other scholars in heritage studies who have argued that heritage conservation as a concept is rooted in ‘Western’ ideologies of objectification and rationalism, based on secular values that would exclude religious value (e.g. Smith Reference Smith2006; Baillie Reference Baillie2006; Byrne Reference Byrne2014). As many critical scholars of heritage have argued, this ideology contains a Eurocentric idea of heritage preservation that characterizes a heritage subject that is monumental, aesthetically appealing and old, in such a way that smaller, less visible and more recent forms of heritage (and the practices that give them meaning and relevance) are made invisible. These tensions manifest and have been addressed in two ways. Institutionally, the exclusion of ‘non-Western’ categories in the growing assemblage of global heritage was recognized to some extent by the World Heritage Committee itself when the advisory body to the World Heritage Convention, ICOMOS, assessed the components of the World Heritage List for issues of representation (UNESCO 1994). This concluded, among other things, that the heritage of Christianity was featured disproportionately more in the World Heritage List than any other religious tradition, while living and ‘traditional’ cultures were under-represented (Labadi Reference Labadi2005). While these trends obscure the broader representation of religious traditions on the list, Dinu Bumbaru (Reference Bumbaru2008) has argued that the criteria used in the World Heritage List specifically to refer to ‘beliefs’ raise the delicate question of putting a particular religion on the list – rather than the material culture of a religion – and therefore other criteria can be used to better articulate the intentions of such a nomination. A Global Strategy for a Representative, Balanced and Credible World Heritage List was launched in the 1990s to broaden the definition of world heritage through adjustments to the criteria used for nomination into the World Heritage List and through investment in thematic analyses. In addition, an intensification of the academic study of heritage debates and practices across ‘non-Western’ societies documented the global heritage discourse interacting with local values and traditional practices that are not easy to assimilate into the work of global organizations such as UNESCO. This tension has been extensively discussed in post-colonial territories of South East and East Asia, where different religious and spiritual traditions resist global heritage standards (Byrne Reference Byrne1995; Adams Reference Adams1998; Karlström Reference Karlström2005), but has not been examined as coherently in other post-colonial territories such as MENA.
It was only more recently that global heritage organizations engaged with the question of religion in earnest. Closing the first decade of the new millennium, UNESCO launched an Initiative on Heritage of Religious Interest, recognizing that approximately 20 per cent of the properties inscribed at the time on the World Heritage List have some sort of religious or spiritual connection (UNESCO 2011). This initiative leaned on a collaboration between various partner organizations which supported the focus on and concern with religion: notably, the 2003 Forum on the Conservation of Living Religious Heritage by the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (Stovel, Stanley-Price and Killick Reference Stovel, Stanley-Price and Killick2005); the International Day for Monuments and Sites for 2008 selecting their theme as ‘Religious heritage and sacred places’ (ICOMOS 2008); and religion becoming the subject of another resolution at the 2011 ICOMOS General Assembly, reiterating a concern with the protection of sacred sites (ICOMOS 2011). In addition, a task force on the cultural and spiritual values of protected areas as a collaboration between UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) resulted in the 2008 UNESCO guidelines for the conservation and management of sacred natural sites (Wild and McLeod Reference Wild and McLeod2008). There are, of course, other organizations with global and regional reach that operationalize different ideologies in alignment with, resistance to or ambivalence towards UNESCO’s work. However, as I aim to demonstrate through the mention of these coordinated international efforts, the work of UNESCO can be considered the most influential, far-reaching and policy-setting, and therefore worthy of careful examination.
Surveying the views and efforts of UNESCO and its adjacent centres to gain a better understanding of the intersections of heritage and religion, Herb Stovel (Reference Stovel2008) highlights that the discipline of conservation acknowledged the unique challenges of operating on sacred places and the need to adapt its standards and practices to this type of historic resource. But, I would argue, this institutional engagement oversimplifies how different faiths and the values that they espouse are reflected tangibly through material culture. For example, these texts assume that any religious value is accessible to expert assessment, able to be made public, and translatable to a global audience. I associate this optimism with the fact that these definitions are drawn from a selection of sites that have already been assimilated to the World Heritage List, and thus made compliant with global ideals and forms of consumption under the global model. On the other hand, Stovel’s survey proposed the idea that conservation, and its principles and practices, could and should act as a mediator for ironing out disagreements of sectarianism, and that religious communities are bestowed with the responsibility to ‘care’ for themselves (i.e. their own heritage), suggesting that conservation advocates retain control and moral authority over religious authorities and their agendas. In this sense, I would argue that religious authorities and institutions are expected to acquiesce to a preservationist mindset and mission, but the opposite is not necessarily true. Religious sites have not always been maintained in a way which preservationists would approve of. This conflict is associated with the need for religious sites to function as religious sites with a strong emphasis on practices, performances and maintaining a use value from the perspective of believer communities (i.e. pilgrims), as has been argued, in particular, in defence of the extensive alterations in and around the al-Haram in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia (cf. Rico and Lababidi Reference Rico and Lababidi2017).
When it comes to addressing the heritage of religious traditions and practices, the legacies and genealogies of the study of cultural heritage and preservation result in what Anna Karlström (Reference Karlström2013) has called a ‘structural problem’ within heritage discourse that prevents it from engaging productively with diverse religious discourses. In addition, it has been argued in the study of material religion that heritage discourses and constructs involve processes of sacralization and secularization that come into conflict with the legitimate authority of religious objects and performances (Meyer and de Witte Reference Meyer and de Witte2013; Paine Reference Paine2013). In this sense, I consider that heritage debates, methodologies and expertise have the ability to alter the conditions of coexistence that are sustained through careful choreography (c.f. Barkan and Barkey Reference Barkan and Barkey2014). Global heritage preservation and management approaches disrupt this balance, if any, through practices of hierarchization that are core to the articulation of heritage significance and the process of transformation of local resources into global products (for example, practices of listing, as well as values-based approaches for stakeholder consultation). The recognition of living-heritage dimensions in global heritage discourse, a category that denotes active and dynamic practices and performances that are intimately tied to the setting of heritage landscapes, presents its own set of challenges. In the context of religious traditions, this type of ‘living’ site does not lend itself so easily to join the concerns of heritage preservation due to constraints imposed by religious practices. For example, although the site of Madā’in Sāliḥ in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been heritagized in accordance with global preservation approaches, Alaa Alrawaibah (Reference Alrawaibah, Exell and Rico2014) argues that religious practices associated with this site have presented some obstacles for public ‘universal’ access of the type expected in a site on the World Heritage List. These limitations are site- and context-specific. While the Vatican is a popular tourist destination, the holiest site in Islam, Mecca, would not have the ability to become a site that boasts ‘global heritage’ value and tourism in the way in which the World Heritage Convention enables, due to strict access rules that make the site open exclusively to believers (Rico Reference Rico2020a). Religious sites in particular bring to the fore an irreconcilable dimension for the internationalization of a heritage of religion: the challenge for this type of heritage is located less in the concept of heritage value itself and more in the uses that are imposed on such sites. The pressures of a growing heritage tourism industry on sacred sites put visitation practices against sacred uses that forbid the same visitation practices (cf. Harrison Reference Harrison2013, 126). The series of incompatibilities that I raise here are best explained by considering the level of agency that different forms of expertise had in the shaping of a global heritage discourse and its approaches. In the next section, I consider the involvement of experts and voices from MENA in the formative years of this discourse.
Regional impact: MENA
The MENA region has been a feature in the historiography of the field of heritage and preservation. In fact, historical surveys of the emergence of global heritage preservation and cooperation start in Europe, gain coherence in France through the work of UNESCO, and quickly move to engage with the Middle East and North Africa, where the Nubian temple complex of Abu Simbel in Egypt gained the full attention of a young UNESCO and propelled the promotion of a ‘universal’ heritage discourse of cooperation through safeguarding and technocratic efforts (Meskell Reference Meskell2018). Here, monumental sites of pharaonic Egypt that embody ancient spiritual beliefs were incorporated into global heritage discourses through expert intervention and later inscription into the World Heritage List of UNESCO: ancient Thebes and its Necropolis, Memphis and its Necropolis, the Pyramid Fields from Giza to Dahshur, and the Nubian monuments from Abu Simbel to Phila – all inscribed on the list in 1979. The institutional treatment of these remnants of a religious tradition was unconcerned with their relation to living communities at the time (Meskell Reference Meskell2018), to such an extent that some of their parts were removed through diplomatic exchanges to join archaeological collections and displays in various Western institutions: the relocation of the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the USA; the Temple of Debod in the Parque del Oeste in Madrid, Spain; the Temple of Taffeh in the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, the Netherlands; and the Temple of Ellesya in the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. This impactful case study for the emergence of global heritage discourse and its instruments represents not only the early years of the global and institutional heritage model, but also the direction that the model would take in terms of addressing the MENA region. It also suggests that, despite the historical and ideological obstacles that I highlight for the specific engagement of a heritage of religion across the MENA region, there are plenty of sites of actual and historical religious significance that have been seamlessly incorporated into national and global heritage assemblages worldwide under specific conditions: namely through a process of redundancy (e.g. historic churches in increasingly secularizing societies) or through other state-led practices of valuing (e.g. they are old, or rare, or exhibit architectural merit).
There is an important distinction that could be made in considering the biographies of heritage sites of religious significance across this region, especially considering the centrality that the work of UNESCO features for remnants from the ‘ancient civilizations’ contained therein: those that pertain to the remains of ancient religions and those that pertain to the remains of living religions. The remains of ancient ‘dead’ religions are prototypical candidates for processes of heritagization, and have also been more successfully incorporated into, and coexisted with, narratives from competing religions. For example, pharaonic temples are featured in medieval Islamic texts (El Daly Reference El Daly2008; Feener Reference Feener and Rico2017). For built landscapes and practices that are associated with living and performed religions, efforts at promoting coexistence across the Muslim world, for example, have been diverse and open-ended. For example, following the Taliban’s actions in Afghanistan, a meeting of religious leaders convened in Doha, Qatar, aimed to craft a statement of tolerance against the perception of authorized iconoclasm. According to the resulting Proceedings of the Doha Conference of ‘Ulamâ on Islam and Cultural Heritage (UNESCO 2005), a document that clarifies the acceptable limits of shared uses, coexistence is possible in as much as the uses to which heritage is put throughout its life history, including the present, are carefully monitored (Rosen Reference Rosen2008, 41). Because of these tensions, I would argue that the discipline of heritage and preservation studies today is significantly more influenced and guided by case studies that denote conflict between uses of heritage involving religious practice than by those which exhibit confluence of values, for two reasons. First, a concern with the politics of archaeology and heritage informed by indigenous and post-colonial studies seeks to examine the processes of conflict and assign accountability accordingly (Shaw Reference Shaw2002). Second, heritage preservation discourse, which straddles academic and public interests and voices, has historically been much more concerned with destruction than with construction of value (cf. Rico Reference Rico, Exell and Rico2016).
An additional reason extends my concern with the historiography and thought traditions of the emergence of a global heritage preservation ethos to bring attention to the challenge of representation of ‘non-Western’ discourses and instruments, and how this situates the MENA region in a peripheral territory where it can be more easily portrayed as a victim rather than an expert agent in heritage management. From the early days of heritage internationalization, I would argue, the Arab states found an unsympathetic community of experts and representatives. Lowenthal (Reference Lowenthal1998, 5) admits in his historical review of the discipline that ‘the language of heritage that suffuses the world is mainly Western’, pointing out that the significant first meeting of historic monuments, in 1931, was led by Europeans (Tunisia, Mexico and Peru only joined in 1964). At first glance, it would appear that the formative years for the emergence of the global discourse under the umbrella of UNESCO may have featured a strong presence of Middle Eastern voices: Julian Huxley, its first director general, travelled extensively throughout the Middle East in support of the work of the organization. He published his meticulous observations in From an antique land (Huxley Reference Huxley1954), accompanying his incorporation of the Middle East in the remit of UNESCO as a historical, not contemporary, contribution that could benefit civilization as a whole (Meskell Reference Meskell2018, 12). This distinction seems to have been noted by cultural leaders across MENA. Correspondence between State Party representatives and the Preparatory Commission to UNESCO (1945–46) show concern amongst cultural representatives of the Arab world, who claimed that the absence of regional representatives in the work of the committee indicated less willingness on the part of the organization to engage with the ‘views and hopes of the Moslem World’ (Rico Reference Rico and Rico2019b, 10).Footnote 1 A proposal was then circulated by the Ministry of Education of Egypt in support of the establishment of a permanent centre of UNESCO in Cairo to act as a link between the seat of the organization and the national commissions of the countries represented in the Arab League.Footnote 2 In support of a regional center, the Egyptian delegation drew attention to the fact that the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, whose work was carried on partially by UNESCO, displayed a purely European outlook. The problem of adopting a legacy that was predisposed to marginalize the needs, circumstances and difficulties of non-European nations was in full swing.
What followed was a period of intense activity as the plans for the inclusion of the nations of the Middle East in the core activities of UNESCO took place during the 1947–49 period, when the creation of a ‘Near and Middle-East Cultural Center’ was discussed and projected. The Near and Middle East become a strategic region in the efforts of the organization to address two key concerns of its Executive Board: the question of representation of UNESCO in the main cultural areas of the world, and the associated efforts to address tensions affecting international understanding. But efforts to regionalize the work of UNESCO raised concerns in Paris, where UNESCO leaders considered these plans to be too ‘autonomous’, giving the impression that they were competing with UNESCO.Footnote 3 The proposed solution? A center coordinated by representatives of UNESCO. In early 1948, the Secretariat launched a survey to inform the establishment of a centre for cultural exchange in the Near East, in order to facilitate a two-way exchange of cultural information between UNESCO and the region, and assist the inhabitants of this region to ‘gain consciousness of their authentic cultural patrimony … in views of the birth of a universal culture’.Footnote 4 Experts were solicited from partners in Egypt and France – ‘preferably Oriental’ – to support the eventual establishment of an International Center of Cultural Cooperation in the Near East that would cluster Arab, Turkish and Iranian interests.Footnote 5 The preferred candidate, the head of the Iranian delegation to the first UNESCO conference, was offered the post and accompanied director general Huxley on his Middle East tour in April of that year. On this trip, he was asked to support the collection of the following types of information: archaeological sites (Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic); museums; bibliographies of sites explored or simply known; names of local archaeologists and professors; a list of legal measures regarding excavations and explorations by nationals and foreigners; selling points for antiquities etc.; and information about education at all levels (university education, secondary education, primary education, literacy), as well as the state of organization of scientific research (especially with regard to the humanistic disciplines). The journey of Dr Huxley itself took him to Istanbul (Turkey), Beirut (Lebanon), Amman and Petra (Jordan), Baghdad (Iraq), Tehran (Iran), Cairo (Egypt), Khartoum (Sudan), Tunis (Tunisia), and Casablanca and Rabat (Morocco),Footnote 6 a vast territory that he covered from 7 April to 11 May 1948.
Following this intense visit to the MENA region, Huxley revisited the establishment of a cultural centre in the Middle East, projecting a centre that would be controlled and financed by UNESCO, and therefore equipped entirely or primarily with personnel external to the region (albeit with some knowledge of the culture of the region, he clarifies).Footnote 7 The tenure of the second director general for UNESCO, Jaime Torres Bodet, started in 1948. It was marked by a series of specialist missions to the region in order to provide technical aid, facilitating ‘a one-sided exportation of information flow, typically from European specialists to their counterparts in poorer nations’ (Meskell Reference Meskell2018, 19), including a mission to Lebanon in 1952 to examine the monuments at Tripoli and Baalbek, and in 1953 to Syria to examine the state of monuments and archaeological sites, including Aleppo, Palmyra, Basra and the Crusader castles. Meskell (ibid.) argues that, while missions were portrayed as exchange of information and experts, ‘these were not exchanges of different worldviews, exploring questions of what constitutes heritage or how to best conserve it’. What the earlier histories of global heritage governance suggest is the operation of a conception of the MENA region as a cluster of monuments, rather than a cluster of communities who occupy and interact intimately with monuments. By the 1970s, more Arab states joined the 1972 convention, aligning with and supporting the heritage-safeguarding mission of UNESCO in different ways since. But they also forge a parallel cultural conversation through institutions such as ICESCO (Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and ALECSO (Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization), whose histories, scope and influence merit a separate discussion.
Conclusions: confronting the ‘Western gaze’
At the intersection of the institutional and disciplinary legacies that I discuss in this article, it is perhaps not surprising to envision how the interests and dominant values that underpin the social, political and historical context of the heritage resources of the MENA region would fail to make an impact on the establishment of institutional and global heritage discourses, debates and approaches. In this article, I also consider that, although the challenges of reconciling heritage and religious preservation, and their interpretations and agendas, are a phenomenon that extends to all regions of the world, the MENA region may have been particularly singled out in ways which perpetuate their exclusion from dominant heritage discourses and forms of expertise. With this foundation as a starting point, the evolution of heritage management and conservation approaches that grow from the 1950s on ignores, at the global level, for example, a long-established tradition of caring for the built landscape that was already carried out in Muslim-majority countries under the purview of the institution of awqaf. Waqf (endowments) is a system that, amongst other things, has been concerned with the upkeep and maintenance of the social relevance of historic structures. Waqf offers a different management strategy for historic and heritage resources that operates in better alignment with its spiritual context, but has different degrees of influence in different historical and political periods and has been discussed in all its historical and political sophistication by other colleagues (e.g. Sabri Reference Sabri2015; Reference Sabri2019).
In this article, I have addressed two interrelated processes that inform the way in which global heritage preservation discourse represents the MENA region. On the one hand, there is a documented general discomfort with religious traditions in the global work of heritage preservation that sets the tone for the exclusion of religion or spiritual traditions as a key theme in heritage valuation. This trend leads to a mis- or under-representation of communities whose ideas of heritage are significantly informed by their religious traditions. On the other hand, the region has been poorly represented in global heritage governance at critical points in its history. To complicate things further, a legacy of Islam-centred conflicts in global histories of heritage preservation signals an expectation of incompatibility between the global preservation ethos and historic landscapes that are occupied and managed by Muslim communities. Considering these long-lasting legacies, how can one counter the dominance of this ‘Western gaze’ for the broad and diverse region of the Middle East and North Africa (and beyond)? In this brief and partial discussion of some of the challenges for the study and management of heritage in this region, I propose that we invest in a more careful consideration of the disciplinary histories that are built by heritage and preservation, as well as other adjacent disciplines operating across the cultural resources in MENA. Calls for a more ethnographic engagement with heritage preservation practices are impactful; I fully support them. However, or rather, in addition to the careful evaluation of the continuous production of knowledge about the heritage significance and values that operate in different ways across the region, the type of consideration that I advocate is parallel to the examination of the role of imperial and colonial histories in the shaping of anthropological enquiry for the MENA region.
Despite wielding significant power over identity politics, cultural-heritage preservation practices have not been interrogated productively within the framework of post-colonial studies. The shaping of the Muslim world by the hands of heritage and preservation debates and practices, the visual images it produces, and the perception and agendas that these generate, cannot simply be explained as a leftover of orientalist scholarship and forms of expertise. Critical assessments of anthropology of the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11 and the advent of the War on Terror have propelled a consideration of the ways in which anthropological enquiry is implicated in Western histories of empire and their impact on scholarly and institutional practices (Deeb and Winegar Reference Deeb and Winegar2016), as well as the interconnections between training, expertise and the private and public institutional agendas that are entangled in the study of this area (Lockman Reference Lockman2016). In contrast, I would argue that the role of heritage preservation has remained unexamined within these broader but powerful frameworks, despite the high degree of influence that heritage politics and rhetoric have had in these very same institutions and agendas. In this discussion, I advocate for a continuation of the explicit enquiry into heritage preservation agendas that are intimately related to the role of archaeology in colonialist and imperialist agendas: implicated in the origins of ‘Near Eastern’ archaeology (Pollock and Bernbeck 2005), in the politics of Middle Eastern archaeology and heritage (Meskell Reference Meskell1998), and in contemporary heritage debates in the Middle East (Daher and Maffi Reference Daher and Maffi2014). In the last few years, an emerging voice has called on art history to join the resistance against the misrepresentations of the Muslim world in disciplinary debates (Harmanşah Reference Harmanşah2015; De Cesari Reference De Cesari2015; Rico Reference Rico2017a). This debate, therefore, advocates for a deeper and more critical examination of the production of a heritage industry and its instruments in alignment with concerns for the ethics of representation of Islam and the Middle East across a variety of disciplines.
Acknowledgements
I am thankful to Lynn Meskell, Ömür Harmanşah, Alex Bauer, Sam Holley-Kline and the peer reviewers assigned to this piece for their generous feedback. My work is supported by the American Council of Learned Societies through a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, and a residential fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
