[Engaging Books is a monthly series featuring new and forthcoming books in Middle East Studies from publishers around the globe. Each installment highlights a trending topic in the MENA publishing world and includes excerpts from the selected volumes.This installment involves a selection from Stanford University Press on the theme of heritage politics. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia
By Rosie Bsheer
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice
By Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine
By Chiara De Cesari
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen
By Nathalie Peutz
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
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Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia
By Rosie Bsheer
About the Book
The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion from educational, cultural, and spatial policies.
With this book, Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects. Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space, territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both through new modes of capital accumulation.
About the Author
Rosie Bsheer is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University.
In the Media
Read an interview with the author on Jadaliyya.
NPR’s Here and Now interviews Rosie Bsheer on the effects of urban redevelopment on Mecca.
Scholarly Praise for Archive Wars
"There are now two distinct eras in the writing of Saudi Arabian history: before Rosie Bsheer's Archive Wars and after." —Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania, author of Oilcraft
"Archive Wars explores with conceptual brilliance and historical aplomb the various forms of historical erasure central not just to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but to all modern states. In a finely-grained analysis, Rosie Bsheer rethinks the significance of archives, historicism, capital accumulation, and the remaking of the built environment. A must-read for all historians concerned with the materiality of modern state formation." —Omnia El Shakry, University of California, Davis, author of The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt
"Archive Wars is an instant classic. With incredible insight, creativity, and courage, Rosie Bsheer peels away the political and institutional barriers that have so long mystified others seeking to understand Saudi Arabia. Bsheer tell us remarkable new things about the exercise and meaning of power in today's Saudi Arabia." —Toby Jones, Rutgers University, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia
"Rosie Bsheer's Archive Wars is one of those extraordinary projects that explodes fictions of so many kinds about archives and state power. This masterful and meticulous book is testimony to the visceral violences that underwrite legal and archival mandates, the bedrock of the massive inequalities that plague our collective worlds now more than ever. Bsheer offers us a reading of the wars that rage in—and over—modern archives, showing that they are not modern because they are unmarred by the destruction of records, but because they are constituted by ever bolder techniques of erasure." —Ann Stoler, The New School for Social Research, author of Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times
Additional Information
September 2020
416 pages
From $30.00 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781503605183
Paper ISBN: 9781503612570
Digital ISBN: 9781503612587
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From Chapter 5: Bulldozing the Past
As Abuldaziz Ibn Saud completed his conquest of much of the Arabian Peninsula in the early 1930s, his regime embarked on the slow and arduous business of state building. Securing the political, economic, social, and territorial viability of newly formed Saudi Arabia occupied the king and the heirs to his throne. Breaking with the past, which accompanied the development of state institutions, was equally important. The modern state, as we have seen, necessitated the erasure of prestate histories and the incompatible truths and socialities they mobilized. In the case of Mecca, this meant, among other things, masking the cosmopolitan Ottoman lifeworld to which Shaykh Muhammad Rahmatullah al-Kairanawi belonged and the thriving socio-intellectual networks that had connected him to his peers and students. Producing the past initially centered on writing and rewriting Saudi Arabia’s official historical narrative. Historical documents and repositories of primary source records subsequently became the regime’s preferred sites for materializing the organizing fiction of the Saudi state’s origins. Toward the end of the twentieth century, the archive also came to include the built environment. If the memorialization of secular history in Riyadh was critical for the consolidation of post–Gulf War Saudi authority, it was complemented by the destruction of another form of historical memory in Mecca.
The early 2000s featured the accelerated demolition of sacred and historical sites in Central Mecca and the replacement of its thousand-year-old topography with imposing steel-and-glass skyscrapers. Cranes dotted the skies of Islam’s birthplace, as smog choked its Grand Mosque (Masjid al-Haram) and the millions of pilgrims who visit it each year. Construction sites and earthmoving heavy equipment became part of the city’s landscape. They marked the movement of pilgrims through dense roads crammed with pedestrians, automobiles, and buses. Over one hundred mixed-use developments were under construction around the mosque. Internationally acclaimed luxury hotels; designer, serviced apartment buildings; and malls lodged inside concrete skyscrapers have replaced the archeological, historical, economic, and cultural landscape of this rapidly developing city.1
As a holy sanctuary, Central Mecca is meant to be sacrosanct. Alterations to its physical environment are religiously sanctioned in rare circumstances, and then only to better serve pilgrims. Even then, the alterations must be judicious, sparing, and carefully executed. Before Al Saud conquered the Hijaz in 1925, they had accused its Ottoman rulers of propagating a so-called age of ignorance (jahiliyya) and of failing to tend to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.2 Once in power, Al Saud promised to “cleanse” Arabia of what they considered heretical practices. In the past, Muslim caliphs and imperial rulers had rarely designated Mecca their political capital. But their imperial ambition had rested on exercising sovereignty over the holy city and capitalizing on pilgrimage revenues and trade networks by tending to the infrastructure of the pilgrimage. Such practices persisted through the modern period.
As did those before them, the Saudi rulers utilized the logic of serving the two holy mosques as a main pillar of rule, this time to confer legitimacy on their Najd-centered state-building project. Maintaining the religious infrastructure entailed the mosques’ upkeep and the building of secure roads, tunnels, bridges, sewage systems, transportation networks, and lodging facilities. These were meant to improve the pilgrimage experience and ensure pilgrims’ safety. The expansion of the Grand Mosque—and thus the destruction of its surrounding areas—began in earnest in the 1950s and increased in the years after the 1973 oil-price hike. Yet the transformations that the city experienced after the turn of the twenty-first century were not only unprecedented but also unfathomable a mere decade earlier. Redevelopment became centered on the overhaul of the neighborhoods surrounding the mosque. The regime, in concert with the Saudi Binladin Group (SBG), summarily brought down whole mountains around the mosque with the force of dynamite. They destroyed much of Islam’s material history, as well as places of religious and historical significance such as the Prophet’s alleged birthplace. Abbasid and Ottoman architecture were also targeted and replaced with commercial megaprojects.
Despite bulldozing the past in Islam’s holiest site, the Saudi state continued to employ religion, and the religious significance of Mecca in particular, for purposes of its own legitimation. To justify such destruction, the regime relied on those religious scholars who argued that memorialization was an innovation: it turned places into sites of visitation, a practice that countered Wahhabi religious and cultural beliefs.3 The use of religious legitimation and the destruction of religion’s material infrastructure were nonetheless peculiar. Such deliberate destruction was a stark contrast to the painstaking preservation of more recent, dilapidated sites associated with Al Saud’s heritage in Riyadh. Some of the same decision makers and planners who oversaw the remaking of Mecca simultaneously decried the loss of what they saw as traditional Saudi identity and culture. They related such tradition with Al Saud’s stronghold in Najd and sought to resurrect it in Riyadh’s built environment.4 Thus in one city, Riyadh, planners spared no expense to replicate an imagined secular past. In the other city, Mecca, they managed the erasure of a much older topography, whose history, on the face of it, informed Saudi sovereignty and subjectivity.
With the regime’s post–Gulf War crisis of hegemony, Mecca came to serve different political and financial purposes, ones rooted in grandiose infrastructural projects and aesthetics whereby secular time overwhelmed religious temporality and subjectivity. Megadestruction was at the heart of reinventing postwar Mecca, but there was also more at stake for the Saudi state. Parallel to the regime’s postwar heritage-making effort in Riyadh, Mecca offered a two-pronged solution to looming political and economic challenges. First, the territorialization of Saudi Arabia’s history necessitated the destruction of spaces that contested the official rendering of the past. That many of those spaces were located in Central Mecca, one of the most visited cities in the world, and evinced a vibrant pre–Al Saud history made the city’s built form a target for state intervention.5 Second, Mecca offered much-needed lucrative investment opportunities for a regime that had suffered financially from decades of military spending and its adverse effects on the economy. Turning Mecca into a neoliberal city was at the heart of the postwar twinned process of real estate and heritage development.6 The symbolic importance of megaprojects and their material logic are indeed interdependent, with processes of memorialization being imbricated with questions of property development, speculation, and diversification.7
Notes
1. Central Mecca has twelve historic neighborhoods: al-Misfala, al-Muʿabida, al- Naqa, al-Qarara, al-Qashashiyya, al-Shamiyya, al-Shubayka, al-Sulaymaniyya, Harat al-Bab, Jiyad, Jurul, Shaʿb ʿAmir, and Suq al-Layl, which is one of oldest neighborhoods in Mecca and the site of the Prophet’s birth. See “Athar Mecca al-nabawiyya wa-ltarikhiyya: Al-Mawlid al-nabawi” [The Prophet’s sites and historical sites in Mecca: Birth of the prophet], Maccawi, http://www.makkawi.com/Articles/Show.aspx?ID=815. These neighborhoods are being replaced by the following development megaprojects: the Development of King Abdul Aziz Endowment Project, Jabal Omar Development Project, Al Shamiyya Development Project, Jabal Khandama Development, Jabal al-Kaʿba, Ajyad Hospital, and the western entrance to Mecca.
2. Ministry of Education, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Tarikh al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya al-Saʿudiyya [History of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] (Riyadh: Ministry of Education, 2005–2006), sixth, ninth, and twelfth grades. For a recent example of how Saudi state media depict the stagnancy and “backwardness” of Ottoman Arabia, see Salem al-Ahmadi, “Takmilat mashruʿ tawsiʿat al-masjid al-nabawi wa mashariʿ tanmawiyya ukhra bi al-Madina al-Munawwara” [Continuation of expansion project of Prophet’s Mosque and other development projects in Medina], al-Riyadh, September 24, 2005, http://www.alriyadh.com/96067.
3. See “Heritage in Context” in Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of the various debates on memorialization practices in Wahhabi thought and how they affect religious and historical sites.
4. Some of the same members who served on the boards of Arriyadh Development Authority and the High Commission for the Development of Dirʿiyya were employed by the Mecca Development Authority and MOMRA, at times also consulting for the big construction firms responsible for redeveloping Mecca.
5. In 2018, planners predicted that in coming years the city would host twenty million visitors a year, with eight million visiting at once during the pilgrimage. Muna al-Manjumi, “Al-mamlaka tuʾakkid bi ‘hayʾat tatwir Makkah wa-l-mashaʿir’: Khidmat duyuf al-rahman al-hadaf al-asma” [The kingdom confirms through the “Mecca and Mashaʿir Development Authority”: Serving pilgrims is the prime goal], Al-Hayat, June 3, 2018.
6. See this article in a state-owned newspaper, Al-Sharq al-Awsat, calling on Mecca to deliver entertainment opportunities so it can compete with cities like Dubai and Paris for tourism: Abdulrahman al-Rashid, “Hel yumkin tatwir Makkah?” [Can Mecca be developed?], Al-Sharq al-Awsat, no. 14433, June 4, 2018. For a study of pilgrimage revenues and the developing tourism sector in Mecca, see Said M. Ladki and Rayan A. Mazeh, “Comparative Pricing Analysis of Mecca’s Religious Tourism,” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage 5, no. 1 (2017): 20–28.
7. Michelle Buckley and Adam Hanieh, “Diversification by Urbanization: Tracing the Property-Finance Nexus in Dubai and the Gulf,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18, no. 1 (2013): 155–75.
(c) by Rosie Bsheer. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transliteration
- List of Frequently Mentioned Institutions, Organizations, and Movements
- Introduction: The Archive Question
- Chapter 1: Occluded Pasts
- Chapter 2: A State with No Archive
- Chapter 3: Assembling History
- Chapter 4: Heritage as War
- Chapter 5: Bulldozing the Past
- Conclusion: The Violence of History
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice
By Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh
About the Book
In 2010, the world's wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty.
The Missing Pages is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript's footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom.
Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art.
About the Author
Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She is the award-winning author of The Image of an Ottoman City: Architecture in Aleppo (2004). Her writing has also appeared in the Huffington Post and the Los Angeles Times.
In the Media
Read an interview with the author on Jadaliyya.
"[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of what is known as the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war, conquest and dispossession. In addition to supplying an important account of a celebrated object, Ms. Watenpaugh has written an impassioned polemic. She invites us to consider how the 'power of curation,' as well as the publicity and wealth attendant upon modern museum culture, can transform an object of specific liturgical use into a highly valued work of art, and what that might mean for all involved." —Ernest Hilbert, The Wall Street Journal
"[Watenpaugh's] book alerts us to the urgent moral and political questions still to be addressed even in the rarefied world of the museum and the library: she forces us to attend to the human agonies, cultural calamities, and moral ambiguities that lie behind many apparently tranquil museum exhibits." —Eamon Duffy, The New York Review of Books
"The Missing Pages is a work that only Watenpaugh could write with her mastery of Arabic, Turkish, and especially Western Armenian....[She] is certain to attract the attention of scholars outside her field promising to usher forth a conversation about the relationship between cultural heritage and human rights." —Elyse Semerdjian, Critical Inquiry
Winner of the 2019 Der Mugrdechian Armenian Studies Book Award, sponsored by the Society for Armenian Studies (SAS).
One of Hyperallergic’s top 25 books of 2019.
Gold Medal (tie) in the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) - History (World) category, sponsored by the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
Shortlisted for the 2020 Saroyan Prize - Non-Fiction category, sponsored by the Stanford Libraries.
Scholarly Praise for The Missing Pages
"This is a book with the soul of language—moving, affirming, illuminating."
—Mark Arax, author of The Dreamt Land: Chasing Dust and Water Across California
"Compelling and original, The Missing Pages brings together deeper layers of culture and history with the ethical issues surrounding art, identity, and ownership."
—Peter Balakian, author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response
"Written with both erudition and passion, The Missing Pages is a must-read for anyone concerned with the human right to art."
—Fatma Müge Göçek, author of Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009
"A wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art."
—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America's Courts
"An essential book for all who are concerned with art, human rights, and post-traumatic resilience."
—Michael Rothberg, author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization
"Heghnar Watenpaugh writes with colorful prose and deep historical texture."
—Eric Bogosian, author of Operation Nemesis: The Assassination Plot that Avenged the Armenian Genocide
Additional Information
February 2019
436 pages
From $30.00 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780804790444
Digital ISBN: 9781503607644
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From Chapter 1: Survivor Objects: Artifacts of Genocide
• LOS ANGELES. THE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM. PRESENT DAY.
The illuminated manuscript pages dwelled in the modern cabinet in the sterile storage room. A visage emerged from the carpet of gold on one of the parchment sheets. He had been restless ever since the great rupture. He stole a glance upward.
Some things had not changed. Above him the roosters strode confidently toward a jeweled vase. To his left his twin visage kept watch. Beneath them an arch opened up like a fan. The partridges and blue birds hidden in the gold leaf still pecked at tendrils. All this rested on three columns of painted porphyry and patterned gold. The column capitals, the blue ox heads, bore the weight, docile as ever. Beyond the frame birds alighted on the pomegranate trees and the outlandish plants Toros had devised. The visage could still feel the painter’s breath as he labored over every detail, holding his delicate brushes. The letters Toros had inscribed beneath the arch stood at attention at their appointed places in a grid outlined in gold. The visage could see all the way down to the base of the columns. Tiny red dots sprinkled along the base resonated with the red of the pomegranates, the roosters’ combs and wattles, even the visage’s own headgear.
Other things had changed, however. The visage remembered that in the beginning he had lived across from another page, a near-echo of his own, with similar roosters, oxen, pomegranate trees, the fanlike arch, even the red dots. His page and the original echo page featured myriad differences, too, that the visage delighted in finding over and over again. Since the great rupture, that echo page had moved away. The visage shared a bifolium with another page instead. Even though it too had an arch, a grid of letters, and even the same color scheme, its differences were jarring. Its trees were palms bearing owls, its partridges pecked at a silver vase, its carpet of gold bore distinct ornaments, its column capitals were twin birds, and its grid of letters was denser. It was not his echo. It was never meant to be seen across from him.
The visage resumed his silent vigil. He had survived the great rupture, but would he ever find his echo again?
. . .
Consider the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels, preserved today at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. You are looking at four sheets of parchment. Each sheet of parchment is folded down the middle, turning into two connected leaves. In the art of bookmaking, a folded sheet is called a bifolium and yields four sides: four folios. Each folio measures 26.5 by 19 centimeters, or 10 7/16 by 7½ inches. The Canon Tables consists of a total of sixteen folios. Eight of the folios bear illuminations, while their eight backs are left blank. These folded sheets of parchment were once nested together in a gathering and bound with other gatherings of folded parchment.1 In the resultant book, the pages appeared in a carefully ordered sequence. As you opened the book and looked at the Canon Tables, you saw the illuminated folios as matched sets, as four pairs of pages facing one another. The facing pages echoed each other’s decoration. As your eye traveled from one page to the other, you would notice their similarities as well as subtle differences, not unlike a refined “Spot the Difference” puzzle. Between each illuminated pair the blank folios allowed you to pause and cleanse your palate before turning to the next meticulously crafted pair of images. The makers of this artwork of great luxury used the most lavish materials, and they could afford to have only one side of a parchment page painted.
The illuminated pages feature decorated architectural frames. The frames shelter golden grids that contain series of letters written in the Armenian alphabet in bolorgir, a lowercase script. Around the frames many species of birds frolic; some hold fish in their beaks, and others drink from vessels or nibble at stylized plants and flowers. Within the frames you discern more birds and even human faces, nestled among ornamental fields in brilliant colors. The facing pairs of the Canon Tables feature the same layouts, yet each page looks unique. The painter Toros Roslin, working in 1256 in the Kingdom of Cilicia, unified them in design yet created subtle distinctions.2 He distilled the essence of medieval visual harmony into eight glorious painted pages.
The letters within the frames represent numbers. The grids of letters are thus numerical tables of a specific kind. The pages at the Getty depict canon tables—concordance lists of passages that relate the same events in two or more of the four Gospels. Designed by Eusebius of Caesarea in the 300s, by the early Middle Ages canon tables almost always preceded the Gospels and usually featured columns of numbers assembled within painted architectural structures. The Canon Tables now at the Getty was once part of a manuscript copy of the four narratives of Christ’s life by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that make up the Christian New Testament. The manuscript is known as the Zeytun Gospels after the remote mountain town where it was once kept and revered for its mystical powers of blessing and protection. When the people of Zeytun were exiled from their homes and exterminated, the manuscript too was taken away and broken into fragments.
The gathering of illuminated Canon Tables that is now in Los Angeles was detached from the mother manuscript of the Zeytun Gospels. No longer part of a book, it now appears as component parts: four sheets of parchment, folded in the middle. You can still see the small holes in the vertical fold at the center of each bifolium, where the threads that bound the manuscript together into a codex would once have been. Perhaps the Canon Tables came loose from the binding over time. Or perhaps someone cut the thread. In any event, somehow the pages bearing the Canon Tables were removed from the Zeytun Gospels.
The photographs of the Canon Tables you see reproduced in this book allow you to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of this work at a remove. If you were in the presence of the Canon Tables, however, you would be able to appreciate the almost three-dimensional quality of painted parchment—the relief created by dots of paint, the way in which areas of color play off of one another, the shimmer of the gold ink: qualities that are difficult to reproduce digitally. You would also have noticed something else. The curators at the Getty have exhibited each bifolium of the Canon Tables as it is—as two connected illuminated folios. However, the illuminations on the connected folios are not the matching pairs the painter intended to be seen together. Indeed, the matching pairs would only find each other if the gathering was nestled together again, as originally intended in the book. In a museum gallery it is difficult to recreate the experience of leafing through a manuscript. You can only exhibit a book open at a particular page or, in the case of the Canon Tables, the entire bifolium. Thus when you encounter Roslin’s Canon Tables on exhibition at the Getty, you will see two facing illuminated pages, but they will not be the matching pair the artist planned. They will be images from two different sets.
Viewing the Canon Tables displayed at the museum, you will also notice another feature that does not readily lend itself to photography. A crease extends horizontally across the two connected pages. It seems that no amount of careful conservation will smooth it out. This crease tells you something about the life story of the Canon Tables. It was likely caused when the gathering was removed from the mother manuscript and folded up.3 This crease enables you to imagine how, at some point, unknown hands removed the Canon Tables from the mother manuscript, how they folded it, perhaps tucked it in a pocket or in the folds of a fabric belt like the ones men wore in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, and took it away. The crease shows us that the work of art bears the imprint of the actions it endured, and of its separation from the mother manuscript. This crease marks the moment when the work became a fragment; it is the trace of its loss.
At that moment the holy manuscript cleaved into two. Each piece acquired a new possessor and embarked on a distinct journey. The mother manuscript followed a twisted path that eventually took it to the Republic of Armenia. The Canon Tables left the Mediterranean littoral, moved across the Atlantic Ocean, and decades later made landfall on the Pacific shore, in one of the world’s greatest and wealthiest museums. In Los Angeles, descendants of the community that once revered the Zeytun Gospels as a devotional object brought out only on special religious occasions can now view its detached Canon Tables on exhibition, displayed alongside other works of art in a museum hall, open to the public.
A fortuitous chain of circumstances brought the Canon Tables to Los Angeles. The Zeytun Gospels is a remnant of a medieval world that is lost forever. It is also the only medieval relic that has come down to us from the once-rich treasuries of Zeytun’s churches. It is among the rare manuscripts to survive the unprecedented assault on Armenian cultural heritage that was part of what we now know as the Armenian Genocide. For every manuscript that endured, many more were lost forever, intentionally destroyed, burned, recycled for other uses, abandoned, or left to decay.
Notes
1. The Canon Tables, Getty Ms. 59, consists of four bifolia. It is probable that the four bifolia at the Getty were originally part of a gathering that included two additional bifolia that are still in the mother manuscript, Matenadaran Ms. 10450. In other words, the Canon Tables was originally part of a gathering of six bifolia. For a discussion of the original sequence of pages at the beginning of the Zeytun Gospels, see Chapter 6. I thank Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts at the Getty, for discussing this issue with me; conversation with the author, Los Angeles, January 4, 2017, and e-mail communication to the author, September 21, 2017. I am solely responsible for any errors.
2. “Roslin endlessly varied the ornamental designs and naturalistic elements, imbuing each page with individuality and vitality.” J. Paul Getty Museum online catalog, www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=5929.
3. A Getty conservation report of 1994 noted this crease. Elizabeth Morrison closely examined the “ridges and troughs” of the crease across the four bifolia for clues as to how the bifolia may have been stored before they entered the Getty collection. She concluded, “We actually cannot tell what order they [the bifolia] were in when they were folded”; e-mail communication to the author, September 21, 2017. I thank Elizabeth Morrison for advising me about this.
(c) by Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.
Table of Contents
- Illustrations
- Prologue
- Chapter 1: Survivor Objects: Artifacts of Genocide
- Chapter 2: Hromkla: The God-Protected Castle of Priests and Artists
- Chapter 3: Zeytun: The Lost World of Ottoman Armenians
- Chapter 4: Marash: The Holy Book Bears Witness
- Chapter 5: Aleppo: Survivors Reclaim their Heritage
- Chapter 6: New York: The Zeytun Gospels Enters Art History
- Chapter 7: Yerevan: Toros Roslin, Artist of the Armenian Nation
- Chapter 8: Los Angeles: The Contest over Art
- Epilogue
- About This Book
- Note on Transliteration and Translation
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine
By Chiara De Cesari
About the Book
In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. These efforts to reclaim and assert Palestinian heritage differ significantly from the typical global cultural project: here it is people's cultural memory and living environment, rather than ancient history and archaeology, that take center stage. It is local civil society and NGOs, not state actors, who are "doing" heritage. In this context, Palestinian heritage has become not just a practice of resistance, but a resourceful mode of governing the Palestinian landscape.
With this book, Chiara De Cesari examines these Palestinian heritage projects—notably the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Riwaq, and the Palestinian Museum—and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state. Through their rehabilitation of Palestinian heritage, these organizations have halted the expansion of Israeli settlements. They have also given Palestinians opportunities to rethink and transform state functions. Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine reveals how the West Bank is home to creative experimentation, insurgent agencies, and resourceful attempts to reverse colonial violence—and a model of how things could be.
About the Author
Chiara De Cesari is Senior Lecturer of European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam.
In the Media
"De Cesari's rigorous analysis takes the reader through a web of complexities which show the different dynamics of heritage. A meticulous treatise indeed—the book makes for valuable reading, in particular when it comes to understanding the many layers of resistance against cultural dispossession and Israel's colonial violence." —Ramona Wadi, The New Arab
"Chiara De Cesari's book on Palestine appears as a groundbreaking work that offers a different option for understanding how heritage is deployed in a proxy state, a political entity under siege, whose international sovereignty is still being renegotiated." —Cheikh Lo, Journal of Folklore Research
Scholarly Praise for Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine
"Chiara De Cesari boldly and creatively shows that politics does not always happen where we expect it to be. Through the stories of activists, architects, and residents of Palestine, De Cesari makes a strong case for how Palestinian heritage can make claims and demands on the Israeli state." —Ann Laura Stoler, The New School for Social Research
"This pathbreaking book links cultural heritage and the postcolonial condition in new and provocative ways. Chiara De Cesari's nuanced ethnography of Palestine reconfigures our understanding of the relationship between sovereignty and culture." —John F. Collins, author of Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy
"A creative and thoroughly researched account of the way space and the material reality of buildings have become an important, if also contradictory, site for Palestinian claims. A must-read for anyone interested in cultural and architectural heritage, urban transformation, museums, or landscape—and how these are used to counter dispossession." — Helga Tawil-Souri, New York University
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September 2019
288 pages
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Excerpt
From Chapter 3: Heritage, NGOs, and State Making
Competing Lists
In 2002, Israel reoccupied the Palestinian Territories in an operation of “politicide” against Palestinian proto-state institutions; among many arguably more important targets, Operation Defensive Shield destroyed cultural heritage on a large scale. Intense media coverage showed shocking pictures of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, what Christians hold as the birthplace of Christianity, under sniper fire. These, along with images of the devastation of the Old City of Nablus, convinced UNESCO and particularly its heritage body, the World Heritage Committee (WHC), that something needed to be done, quite urgently, to save the heritage of the Palestinian Holy Land.1 As Palestinian heritage includes some of the most important sacred places of the three monotheistic world religions, it certainly possesses “outstanding universal value”—the quality that makes heritage of worldwide significance worthy of UNESCO protection. But in 2002 there were no Palestinian listings yet on the World Heritage List (except for the Old City of Jerusalem, nominated by Jordan in the 1980s), which meant that Palestinian heritage lacked official international recognition and protection: Palestine, as a nonstate, could not be a member of UNESCO and was thus not in a position to ratify the World Heritage Convention or nominate properties to the list. The WHC first accepted Palestinian nominations to the list only after UNESCO’s general conference recognized Palestine in a landmark vote on October 31, 2011.2 But well before that, DACH [the PA’s Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage] and UNESCO Ramallah had prepared a “tentative list” in UNESCO jargon, the inventory of key heritage sites from which such nominations are drawn.
This list, published in 2005 as a fifty-page brochure including information about each property,3 was something like a road map of top-priority areas requiring intervention in the coming years. For the PA, it was also a symbolic step, a performance of sovereignty and nation-statehood. There was controversy over what to call the Palestinian tentative list, given Israel’s sensitivity on the issue (technically only officially recognized states can submit tentative lists), and this is itself a barometer of how UN jargon can invest actors with the mantle of statehood. But the reality of the Palestinian nonstate was already embedded in the incredibly long title eventually given to this list in place of its usual name: the Inventory of Cultural and Natural Heritage Sites of Outstanding Universal Value in Palestine. This is a prime example of the inventive solutions bureaucrats concoct to make legal sense of Palestinian political liminality without incurring Israeli sanctions.
For the PA, achieving World Heritage status was important in many respects. Most immediately, UNESCO recognition was a powerful, if indirect, way to reaffirm sovereignty over and contest the Israeli occupation of many Palestinian heritage sites (and the villages and cities nearby), and even to defend them from the erection of the separation wall.4 (The connection between World Heritage status and enactment of Palestinian sovereignty was emphasized by Israel’s furious reactions to the inscription of Hebron on the World Heritage List in July 2017, with Netanyahu slashing Israel’s UN budget to finance a Jewish heritage museum in the city.5) Also, having sites on the World Heritage List is a symbol of nation-statehood, and politicians and governments consider it a factor of international prestige. According to Lynn Meskell,6 the inscription process functions as a connectivity- and value-enhancing device by turning heritage sites into highly valuable assets with both a sign value and an exchange value that can be mobilized in all sorts of transactions, a global currency that can earn a wide range of gains to the state: international recognition, capital investments, commercial contracts, political leverage, and territorial gains, among others. World Heritage status promises states participation in the circuit and revenues of global tourism, boosting the value of what, in the rhetoric of politicians and (some) practitioners, is the “oil” of Palestine, potentially able to unleash future economic prosperity (in the transnational language of neoliberal cultural policy making worldwide, heritage can be a “resource” and “asset” for countries with otherwise scarce natural and other resources).7 If large-scale tourism development remains a distant prospect, tapping into the World Heritage network means building transnational alliances, and funding and empowerment.8 And having sites on the list wins states some points in global taxonomies of national value and cultural worth. In short, World Heritage status makes the PA “look” more like a state, and a prestigious one at that.
So in the early 2000s, the WHC began the process of including major Palestinian cultural and natural properties on the World Heritage List. While the Palestinian tentative list was being compiled, UNESCO’s presence in Ramallah was strengthened, thanks to the addition of a new cultural desk and a program specialist for culture and cultural heritage. But this specialist was given limited authority. Indeed, the Israeli government—generally suspicious of UNESCO and unwilling to recognize any role for the international community or to give up jurisdiction of any type over annexed Jerusalem—did not accept UNESCO Ramallah’s authority over the holy city.9 The result was an unstable compromise in which the new cultural officer had a mandate for the West Bank and Gaza but not East Jerusalem, where the heart of Palestinian heritage is located. The battle over control and sovereignty over the Holy Land was waged on the terrain of heritage.
Notes
1. For the logic and history of World Heritage, see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006; Meskell 2016, 2018.
2. On October 31, 2011 UNESCO’s general conference voted to admit Palestine as a member state by a large majority; 107 countries voted in favor, 14 voted against (including the United States, Israel, Germany, Canada, and Australia), and 52 abstained. Soon afterward, the United States and Israel, who had strongly opposed this move, announced their retaliation against UNESCO and Palestine. The United States immediately halted its UNESCO contributions, throwing the organization into chaos and forcing a revision of its overall budget (the United States had just contributed about 22 percent of UNESCO’s budget). Israel not only withheld its UNESCO contribution but also immediately punished the PA, announcing the construction of two thousand more housing units in its West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements, as well as halting the transfer of the tax revenues it collects for the PA.
3. DACH 2005
4. De Cesari 2010b, 2014.
5. Beaumont 2017
6. For example, Meskell 2016, 2018.
7. See De Cesari 2019
8. While UNESCO usually does not fund projects directly, in Palestine it funded some conservation projects and mobilized other monies for the sites included in the tentative list, together with supporting a range of capacity-building activities. For DACH, the collaboration with UNESCO meant, if not much enhanced operational capacity, at least a certain heritagization of the language of its employees, previously dominated by the old antiquities-and-archaeology idiom.
9. For an analysis of the structural limitations of UNESCO’s initiatives in East Jerusalem and its dependency on Israel’s goodwill, see Dumper and Larkin 2012.
(c) by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.
Table of Contents
- Note on Transliteration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Stakes of Heritage and the Politics of Culture
- Chapter 1: A Political History of Palestinian Heritage
- Chapter 2: Government Through Heritage in Old Hebron
- Chapter 3: Heritage, NGOs, and State Making
- Chapter 4: Palestinian National Museums Post-Oslo
- Conclusion: Cultural Governmentality and Activist Statehood
- Notes
- References
- Index
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Islands of Heritage: Conservation and Transformation in Yemen
By Nathalie Peutz
About the Book
Soqotra, the largest island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, is one of the most uniquely diverse places in the world. A UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, the island is home not only to birds, reptiles, and plants found nowhere else on earth, but also to a rich cultural history and the endangered Soqotri language. Within the span of a decade, this Indian Ocean archipelago went from being among the most marginalized regions of Yemen to promoted for its outstanding global value. Islands of Heritage shares Soqotrans' stories to offer the first exploration of environmental conservation, heritage production, and development in an Arab state.
Examining the multiple notions of heritage in play for twenty-first-century Soqotra, Nathalie Peutz narrates how everyday Soqotrans came to assemble, defend, and mobilize their cultural and linguistic heritage. These efforts, which diverged from outsiders' focus on the island's natural heritage, ultimately added to Soqotrans' calls for political and cultural change during the Yemeni Revolution. Islands of Heritage shows that far from being merely a conservative endeavor, the protection of heritage can have profoundly transformative, even revolutionary effects. Grassroots claims to heritage can be a potent form of political engagement with the most imminent concerns of the present: human rights, globalization, democracy, and sustainability.
About the Author
Nathalie Peutz is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University Abu Dhabi.
In the Media
Read an interview with the author on Jadaliyya
"This book, the result of ten years of research and follow up, explores the sociopolitical transformation of Soqotra, the main island of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago. Peutz offers a detailed ethnographic presentation of the complicated and unsettled recent history of the island within its larger regional and global context...Recommended." —A. Rassam, CHOICE
Winner of the 2019 MES Book Award, sponsored by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) - Middle East Section.
Honorable mention for the 2019 AGAPS Book Award, sponsored by The Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS).
Scholarly Praise for Islands of Heritage
"Islands of Heritage is at once a dazzling ethnography of everyday life and a well-researched history that is as extraordinary as its subject, the island of Soqotra in the Arabian Sea. It is truly a pleasure to read."
—Steven C. Caton, Harvard University
"Nathalie Peutz has written a beautiful account of the unsettling effects of and dynamics between international conservation efforts, national politics, and Soqotran notions of heritage, history, and place. Islands of Heritage is one of the richest ethnographies of the Arabian Peninsula and Indian Ocean region that I have read in years."
—Mandana Limbert, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
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November 2018
368 pages
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From Chapter 3, When the Environment Arrived
When the rains let up following my move to Homhil, the women of Qayher slapped another layer of mud plaster onto the interior walls of my stable-turned-house. As they rejected my attempts to assist them, I spent much time with their children—perhaps one of the most common but least-commented on pastimes of immersive fieldwork. One afternoon, while sitting in Bu Yaqub’s courtyard with some school-age boys, I asked them for the Soqotri names of some nearby items. A few names in, the boys consulted among themselves in Soqotri.
“Wait!” one said. Then each boy ran off separately and returned some minutes later with handfuls of leaves and twigs.
“Tirimo!” said one, handing me a cluster of waxy, green leaves.
“Sebira!” said another, waving a different bunch. Dutifully, I traced each specimen in my notebook and recorded its Soqotri name: ʿikshih, tayf, mitrer, ʾimtihe, aʿarhiyib. The boys took off again only to come back carrying more: qamhin, rihini, zamaʿano.1 I was surprised: this was not the vocabulary I had considered essential—at least not for daily communication. Was this an example of the “high level of environmental awareness” or “strong ethic of environmental stewardship” commonly attributed to Soqotrans—especially the herders—by the managerial “global ecocrats” deployed to promote biodiversity conservation on the island?2 Or were the boys simply gathering the objects that had most interested foreign researchers and experts before?
As I observed in the following months, there was no shortage of researchers alighting on Homhil or in any of the designated “areas of special botanical interest” on the island. Indeed, my interlocutors often spoke of their island being overresearched and even showed signs of research fatigue—in their steadfast refusal to answer economists’ household surveys, in their learned critiques of other ethnographers’ practices and writings, and in their assured instructions for how I should conduct my fieldwork. Most of these researchers, myself included, were in some way connected to the successive integrated conservation and development projects that operated in the archipelago between 1997 and 2013. Despite these projects’ shifting objectives, varying donors, and changing directors, Soqotrans referred to each and all of them indiscriminately as “the Environment” (al-biʾa), an abbreviation for “the environmental project” (mashruʿ al-biʾa)—itself a striking synecdoche for the range of biodiversity conservation and rural development interventions introduced during this period.
Much like Soqotrans spoke about the emergence of the various political regimes, they also described the turn-of-the-millennium arrival of the Environment as a foundational juncture. “When the Environment arrived,” a neighbor explained, “Homhil became a protected area.” “When the Environment arrived,” one of the shaykhs in Homhil told me, “we stopped cutting down trees.” “When the Environment arrived, we learned about conservation,” was a common refrain. So I was surprised, six months into my fieldwork, to hear Sownhin suggest otherwise. “We knew how to protect our trees even before the Environment arrived!” he proclaimed. Whether or not the ICDP interventions impacted their environmental practices, Soqotrans generally regard them as having inaugurated a significant transformation in their relationship to their surroundings and to the outer world. Essentially, these ICDPs [integrated conservation and development projects] introduced the concept of “the environment” as a distinct object to be governed, managed, abstracted, commoditized, and consumed for the purpose of saving it. Tellingly, the Soqotri language has no term for “the environment” as a single entity, despite Soqotrans’ long-standing traditions of resource conservation and regulation. Additionally, these projects introduced the neoliberal assumption shared by many ICDPs—what the anthropologist Paige West calls “conservation-as-development” projects—that conservation could be a source of economic growth.3 The ICDPs, working in tandem with the government, had determined that environmental tourism would become one of the main avenues for generating sustainable development on Soqotra.
The influx of foreign botanists, zoologists, marine biologists, geologists, archaeologists, linguists, and ethnographers during this period was unprecedented. Nevertheless, the far-reaching allure of Soqotra’s natural resources dates back at least two millennia, if not earlier. Likewise, the advent of scientific expeditions to Soqotra dates back to, and developed hand in glove with, the beginning of Britain’s colonial protectorate over the Sultanate of Qishn and Soqotra. Armed with depictions of Soqotra and its inhabitants found in classical Greek and Roman histories, medieval Arabic and Persian geographies, early-modern travelogues, missionaries’ letters, and merchants’ journals, these nineteenth-century European scientists arrived with a preformed notion of what kind of environment they would find and how it could be cultivated through imperial interventions. Just as these explorers’ “environmental imaginaries” were shaped by those of their predecessors (many of whom had never been to Soqotra),4 their own representations continue to influence the technocratic interventions of the transnational ICDPs today. In this sense, the arrival of the Environment on Soqotra at the turn of the twenty-fist century, however novel, was preceded and prefigured by the centuries-long arrivals of foreigners and the continued, reiterated dissemination of their ideas about Soqotra’s environmental exceptionality.
Historians have shown that Anglo-European colonial powers relied specifically on their environmental imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa to justify their colonization of the region and to frame their ensuing modernization projects. These imaginaries were often influenced by Western clichés of exotic (feminized) Nature and degenerate (overly sexual, overpopulating) nonwhites; that is, non-Western environments were also (and continue to be) viewed through an “orientalist” lens.5 Believing the region’s arid environments to have been degraded by their inhabitants’ land-use practices (overirrigation or deforestation), their goats (overgrazing), or Islam, colonial and imperial powers sought to “improve” or even “restore” them to their former mythical productivity.6 As elsewhere in the region, contrasting imaginaries of Soqotra’s barrenness and verdure gave rise to Soqotran pastoralists being alternately blamed for their island’s alleged environmental degradation and upheld as seasoned environmental stewards.7 From the early-modern period onward, Anglo-European visitors to Soqotra depicted its environment as a degraded or neglected version of its mythical, fertile past. Describing Soqotra as a barren island inhabited by a debased, ignorant, and idle population, nineteenth-century colonial officials blamed its “natives” for failing to cultivate the island’s rich soil. A century later, colonial administrators and scientists faulted them for overgrazing their pastures. What makes these colonial-era representations of Soqotra particularly noteworthy are the ways in which they portrayed its landscape(s) as both utterly extraterrestrial and positively domestic. Soqotra’s environment stood out for being exotic and for not resembling the arid and ostensibly wasted landscapes of southwestern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. Conceived as a place apart in space and time, as well as a landscape of “self,”8 Soqotra’s imagined decline was both environmental and social.
Thus, as mercantile interests in Soqotra’s natural products were supplanted by imperial and neoliberal efforts to exploit and monetize Soqotra’s environmental resources, rural Soqotrans were deemed in recurrent need of agricultural and environmental tutelage. With the arrival of the ICDPs, Soqotrans were taught to view their natural heritage as their financial future. As Soqotrans would also learn, however, the greater the economic value attributed to their island’s material and symbolic nature, the less control they would retain over this increasingly privatized and alienated commodity.
Notes
1. Scientific names of the plants listed (all endemic), respectively: Commiphora ornifolia, Aloe perryi, Croton Soqotranus, Euphorbia arbuscula, Dracaena cinnabari, Dendrosicyos Soqotrana, Punica protopunica, and Boswellia Soqotrana.
2. RoY 2000a: 16; Cheung and DeVantier 2006: 270; see also RoY 2006: 36, 70; the term “global ecocrats” comes from Sachs 1993: 18.
3. West 2006: xii.
4. D. Davis 2011a: 3.
5. Sawyer and Agrawal 2000.
6. D. Davis 2011a; Burke 2009b.
7. See Chatty 2003; D. Davis 2011a.
8. D. Davis 2011b: 62–63. Not all non-Western environments were considered alien or abject. Diana Davis argues that, in contrast to the British experience of the “foreign” nature of landscapes in India and the Arabian Peninsula, the French viewed North Africa as “a landscape of Gallo-Roman ‘self’”: a ruined variant of its imagined Roman past (ibid.).
(c) by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved. Published by Stanford University Press, www.sup.org. No reproduction or any other use is allowed without the publisher’s prior permission.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Language, Transliteration, and Confidentiality
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Hospitality in Unsettling Times
- Chapter 2: Hungering for the State
- Chapter 3: When the Environment Arrived
- Chapter 4: Arrested Development
- Chapter 5: Reorienting Heritage
- Chapter 6: Heritage in the Time of Revolution
- Conclusion
- Appendix: The House of ʿAfrar
- Notes
- References
- Index
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com