On Barak, Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet (University of California Press, 2024).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

On Barak (OB): My previous work on energy and technology made me acutely aware of how often the physical world is absent from our analysis of social and political realities in the Middle East and elsewhere. Conversely, I noticed how crucial social, political, and cultural aspects are for understanding the physical world. This double lacuna becomes especially stark when facing global heating.

While we often consider the Middle East a “hotspot,” we seldom take the heat seriously or consider it a key variable that, perhaps like gender, inflects historical reality in crucial yet hitherto ignored ways. To continue the gender analogy with a concrete example, in the book I trace the impact of the August 1929 heat on the eruption of the famous intercommunal riots that some historians argue triggered the conflict over Palestine. It turns out that one unacknowledged trigger for these riots was libidinal tension surrounding fair-skinned Jewish women wearing shorts in ethnically mixed cities like Jaffa. For these Eastern European immigrants, shorts were a multifaceted choice: a fashion expressing socialist ideology, a feminist statement, a Zionist declaration about letting sweat impregnate the soil of the holy land, and an important mode of adaptation to the Levantine heat. However, this choice was gravely misinterpreted in inter-cultural translation, as both local Palestinian men and Arab Jews viewed it through starkly different cultural frameworks. Combined with the political economy of citriculture, which like the fashion industry had seasonal patterns, heat—and the schemes to alleviate it—emerged as a significant factor in a keystone conflagration. What would happen, I wondered, if we added heat to the rather limited social analysis toolkit that so far includes categories like gender, class, age, or race? How does heat intersect with these categories, giving them new meanings?

J: Can this principle be applied to the present?

OB: Given the timing of the book’s release, consider this: among several other valid explanations for the eruption of the current war in Gaza, the Hamas attacks on October 7th can be seen as an attempt to derail Saudi-Israeli normalization, which in turn threatened to sideline Palestinian nationhood. But what drove this normalization forward in the present timing? Heat offers one surprising answer: in a rapidly warming world, the Arab Gulf heats up much faster than the global average. This region is already among the first to feel the consequences of burning its own oil and natural gas. This intense heat, and no less importantly—like in 1929—attempts to escape it, generate increasing rates of violence.

For example, Saudi Arabia expends the lion's share of its electricity on air conditioning and water desalination. In an increasingly hot and arid world, both processes feed vicious cycles: the hotter it gets, the more oil must be combusted for cooling and desalination, exacerbating the very problems they aim to solve. Attempts to diversify away from the oil economy—including Saudi plans to use the kingdom's uranium for nuclear power generation to keep sustaining life in this arid theatre and to free up oil for lucrative sale on the open market—require Israeli support in the US Congress, thus lubricating the wheels of normalization. Israel's importance as a transit state for Saudi oil to the Mediterranean also increases in this context. Furthermore, in a heating and more volatile world, Israeli arms are in greater demand, further stoking the normalization engine. In other words, heat and the political economy of fossil fuels again provide a relevant yet often overlooked context for a conflagration usually explained only in ideological terms. The thermal realities of the region continue to shape its geopolitics, just as they did a century ago.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

OB: Along these lines, each of the book’s chapters explores cycles of thermal dynamics and cooling attempts that contribute to multi-scalar heating and simultaneously to social strife. “Under the Skin” examines perspiration, the body's natural cooling mechanism. It traces the transformation of sweat from a desirable, even erotic substance in early modern times to an abject fluid to be suppressed or masked. This shift coincided with the rise of artificial, fossil-fueled cooling methods, contributing to environmental heating as well as to social tensions, for example between sweaty manual laborers and those who relied on other people’s physical work.

“Heat Islands” focuses on the turn to the coast everywhere between Beirut and Alexandria, including the development of a culture of sea bathing and changes in urban planning such as defortification. This shift involved new modes of transportation and architecture reliant on asphalt, oil, and reinforced concrete—major greenhouse gas emitters that created urban heat sinks along the Mediterranean coast. The politics of empire and the advances of capitalism are also traced by their thermal dynamics. 

“Into the Bubble” explores the introduction of air conditioning in Egypt and Saudi Arabia from the 1940s. This emblematic vicious cycle relied on fossil-fuel-generated electricity for cooling while simultaneously enabling oil extractivism in hot regions as American oilmen could not survive in Arabia without their ACs.

“Internal Combustions” examines the rise of private-car society in the region during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly focusing on thermal dynamics in Egyptian buses. Sexual harassment drove those who could afford it to abandon public transport for private cars, leading to increased traffic congestion, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and urban heat islands.

The book concludes by exploring the concept of “sphering”—insulating oneself in a closed bubble. This dynamic, like abstract conceptual scientific tools that inform how we address the climate crisis, transforms heat into benign global warming, creating a foam of connected yet separate, depoliticized spheres. Breaking out of these comfortable invisible cages that trap us in vicious cooling and heating cycles requires acknowledging their existence and can be aided by retracing their historical formation. History is also useful for imagining that another world is possible, given that such a world had existed not so long ago.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

OB: This question can be answered in two complementary ways. The first emphasizes change and development: My previous books dealt with technologies like trains, tramways, and telegraphs, and then with the fossil fuels powering them. Now, I explore the consequences of combusting these fuels: the release of greenhouse gases propelling global warming, the creation of local heat sinks, and the unlearning of existing heat adaptation methods. 

The second stresses continuity: As in my previous books on time or energy, I remain interested in how abstractions form and function, as well as in the value of human experience—often occluded by abstractions, which can depoliticize important spheres of interaction. “Global warming” is an indispensable abstraction, yet no one directly suffers from it, making it difficult to assemble an effective resistance. Additionally, like my previous works, Heat, A History seeks to carve out a space for the humanities in conversations typically dominated by scientists and engineers.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

OB: Beyond the usual suspects, i.e. Middle East specialists, climate scientists, and perhaps urban planners, the book was written with a more general readership in mind. Trying to promote a shift in attention from global warming to local heating and from abstraction to experience, Heat seeks to think of the climate crisis politically, in ways that involve emotions and concrete experiences, as well as cultural forms ranging from theology through poetry to cinema.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

OB: My new project, Petrofutures Past and Present: A History of Future-Making in the Arab Gulf, 1960-2030, combines my interests in temporality, energy, and heat. It aims to provide a historical account of a future vision forged within a double bind: petrostates in one of the world’s hottest regions accelerating their business-as-usual model to slingshot away from the consequences of combusting their product. These are actors whose history and culture equips—but also burdens—them with various notions of nonlinear time and futurity and whose political economic position capacitates to promote them globally. But whereas the climate poli-crisis feeds off multiple social, cultural, and natural dynamics, its study thus far fails to amalgamate the requisite approaches to address its complexity. This project, then, is another attempt to find a useful angle for the humanities in addressing these issues.

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction, pages 1 to 5)

Heat never exists in isolation; it requires a human subject to experience and fathom it. So to understand the phenomenon of heat, let us consider a woman and her great-granddaughter, each a composite of several real historical persons who lived in Cairo, Jaffa, and Beirut during the twentieth century. Let’s call the first character, strolling through the narrow, shaded alleys of one of these Middle Eastern cities in the year 1900, Warda (“rose”). Her name alludes to a tradition according to which this flower was created when a drop of sweat fell to earth during the mi’raj, the heavenly ascent of The Prophet Muhammad. Warda indeed grappled with the region’s hot climate in a time-tested choreography. The qaylula, or midday siesta, offered a brief, though cherished, respite. During high summer she sought solace primarily within the confines of her home, where she observed the pedestrians in the street through the intricate wooden mashrabiyas that adorned her building’s upper floors. Women like Warda would sit for hours by clay jars dripping with moisture placed near these latticed screens that shielded the sun’s rays and chilled interiors with evaporative cooling, akin to her own sweat’s delicate lattice. The body’s natural cooling mechanism was not only warmly embraced in prophetic traditions but also actively encouraged with loose cotton garments, spicy food, or a cup of mint tea or robust black coffee, each serving as a sensory connection to the vibrant world around her. When night descended, Warda would join her family and fall asleep on the cooler expanse of the house’s rooftop. She was lucky: in some families, for reasons of modesty women were not allowed to mix with the men and had to sleep indoors.

In stark contrast, Warda’s great-granddaughter Salwa (“comfort,” the pursuit of which, while not entirely new, now became an all-consuming obsession) navigated a city greatly transformed. And she did so with more potent yet, at the same time, more limited means. Many of the once-shaded alleys had given way to expansive thoroughfares dominated by the unforgiving surfaces of concrete and asphalt, further exacerbating the urban heat island effect. More and more educated women like Salwa were now shuttled through these broad streets by buses and cars, welcomed, or pushed into the modern job market. Homes had transformed into atomized climate-controlled cocoons, relying on fossil-fueled refrigeration technologies instead of the passive cooling offered by mashrabiyas, wind towers, and other architectural schemes tailored to local climate conditions. The qaylula had surrendered to ceaseless work shifts made possible by the omnipresent hum of air conditioners. These devices, while offering a semblance of comfort, also curtailed the nocturnal reprieve of rooftop slumber, because of their incessant noise and heat emissions. Detachment from the world meant taking some distance from one’s body: Salwa blocked or concealed her perspiration with deodorants and synthetic fibers. She found refuge from the heat in cold soda and iced drinks, a departure from the hot beverages of the past. The prevalent mentality of escape was equally evident in frequent motorized beach excursions, providing a brief respite from the scorching urban heat that had come to epitomize the era’s conclusion: the atmosphere itself had adjusted to human climate control and the resultant surge in greenhouse gas emissions. Salwa's contemporary Cairo, Beirut, or Jaffa stood several degrees warmer than her great grandmother’s hometown.

Overheating is a prime mover of our climate crisis, driving various forms of environmental degradation. Yet paradoxically, as the problem escalates, and as anthropogenic interference with the atmosphere’s capacity to trap heat grows, our thinking about hotness diminishes. This book is about heat and how the global middle classes became desensitized to it, producing a deadly numbness in a heating world. Natural scientists typically call this heating “global warming,” but I argue that not only is there a difference in degree between warming and heating but also a crucial difference in kind: nobody really suffers from “global warming,” which is an abstraction. Instead, we suffer from more immediate causes of human distress—waves of heat and cold, desertification, droughts, floods, storms, and more. In this book I argue that many scientific methods of accounting for heat, expressed through the shorthands of “global warming” and “climate change” have actually desensitized us to environmental overheating. They are, ironically, part of the story of how the global middle classes grew numb as the world got hotter. Part I of this introduction recounts the history, limitations, and hitherto ignored toll of this abstract outlook.

Heat offers an engaging alternative to “global warming” as a category for physical-socio-cultural analysis, one attuned to lived experience. To some extent, the “heat” perspective has deep historical roots: luminaries from Galen to Montesquieu thought that climate molded personalities or even entire peoples and regarded heat and cold as potent forces that nurtured tropical cultures of leisure and siestas and the rationality of northerners—and thus climate was potentially political. The essentialist belief that specific human groups are shaped by environmental heat has thankfully been laid to rest. However, with the demise of this belief, the view that heat is a social differentiator was also discarded. In its stead, a fixation on incremental planetary temperature increase has arisen, which masks the fact that it is the local and more immediate thermal dynamics, the extremities of daily and seasonal oscillations of heat and cold, that stir people into action.

Part II of the Introduction looks to one of the world’s most protracted struggles, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to show heat’s potential political effects. Clashes may erupt because of heat in orchards and streets, or as a result of attempts at cooling off by going to the beach or wearing shorts. This is a taste of what the book has in store: the rest of the book advances the argument that individuals and groups, in their physical and social involvements, with their sweating, bickering, and exasperation, do not experience the effects of a broad planetary trend shown on a scientist’s graph. Instead, their suffering and the creative ways in which they try to relieve it are rooted in localized heat. Politics, too, often takes place mainly within local, communal, urban, or national contexts, making it challenging to mobilize political action for a distant, abstract planetary cause like global warming. To address the climate emergency politically, and to deepen our thinking about heat alongside world-encompassing scales and abstractions, the subsequent chapters explore heat and its effects on interpersonal relationships and broader social structures in local rather than planetary settings. These range from gardens to cotton fields, from sweatshops to city neighborhoods, as well as beaches, highways, cinemas, and buses; and are presented on scales which are modest and local as well as those that are trans-local and trans-regional. Heat exerts its influence ubiquitously, touching upon every aspect of our lives and environments. Heat’s chosen focus areas have been selected due to their interplay and interconnectedness, revealing how thermal and social dynamics intersect. For example, highways, automobility, and urban planning contribute together to the urban heat island effect and connect urban centers to one another and to theaters beyond municipal borders, such as beaches and agricultural hinterlands. Moreover, these arenas serve as conduits that bridge different realms of human activity, spanning the corporeal, domestic, infrastructural, cultural, and political domains. They also facilitate the integration of production and consumption, collectively advancing nuanced, human-calibrated understandings of thermal dynamics, and hopefully more responsive politics.

True to this goal, Heat directs attention to history and to the Middle East. It offers an alternative perspective to “global warming” which is future-oriented and which tells us that as bad as it is today, it will be much worse tomorrow. However, we need not inhabit a period of warming to experience a politics of heat. As a force that can be traced through history, through its effects on human and non-human actors, stories about heat invite us to explore the past. It also directs attention to ignored hotspots of the world, recasting them as repositories of experience and insight for other regions, and for the present and future. In a reversal of the arrow of progress, whereby the West allegedly leads the rest towards a bright future, historical episodes in overlooked corners of the globe emerge as sources of acumen and advance warning from a region that has encountered many heat-related challenges before other parts of the world. The Middle East thus serves as a laboratory in which to scrutinize the local impacts of heat. In this hotspot geopolitics, the history of imperialism, fossil fuel extraction, and the ensuing radical social and environmental change intersect with desertification, frequent heatwaves, and a temperature rise that is twice as rapid as the global average; in urban areas, it can be up to four times more severe.

Moreover, for the better part of a century the Middle East has been on the cutting edge of new technologies for coping with heat: widespread use of air conditioners, shifts in urban planning, and changes in mobility have all served as temporary remedies for the heat. However, these measures have ultimately fueled not only greenhouse gas emissions but also a collective myopia regarding the impact of rising temperatures. Gathering momentum unabated, a burgeoning culture of mechanized palliatives has displaced older, established architectural styles developed to cope with arid environments. This techno-culture has also eradicated long-standing practices of respite—such as nocturnal solace on rooftops, or the midday hiatus. Alongside these practices, the once-celebrated acceptance and valuation of perspiration and other cooling processes—a kind of wisdom honed over centuries in torrid terrains—is now marginalized. As we strive to illuminate humanity’s experience of mercury’s rise, we must navigate the intricate interplay of technological adaptation and acclimatization and the indelible imprints they have left in their wake.