Search Results

This chapter discusses the twentieth-century history of Saudi Arabia through the biography of Hamad al-Jāsir. More than any other single person, al-Jāsir was responsible for shaping the modern genealogical culture of Saudi Arabia. The chapter examines al-Jāsir's life from his birth in 1909 in a central Arabian village to the beginnings of his genealogical project in the 1970s. It considers al-Jāsir's sometimes tumultuous relationship with his patrons in the Wahhabi religious establishment, his contributions to the development of the Saudi press and public culture, and his views on Arabia's bedouin populations and on the Arabic language. It also explores al-Jāsir's turn toward scholarship and the documenting of Saudi lineages in the last third of his life.

This chapter follows the lives of Saudi lineage seekers as they weave in and out of Hamad al-Jāsir's letters and their own personal narratives and texts. It first examines al-Jāsir's genealogical volume Jamharat Ansāb al-Usar al-Mutahaddira fī Najd (The Preponderance of the Lineages of the Settled Families of Najd). It then relates the story of one of al-Jāsir's lineage-seeking petitioners, known as Rāshid b. Humayd. Rāshid's story calls attention to the intimate and personal concerns that propel the modern Saudi search for tribal lineages, genealogy between oral culture and textual culture, and the state's sometimes heavy hand in policing the boundaries of public culture in the kingdom.

This chapter examines marriage patterns in Arabian history and how knowledge of these patterns became a key element of Saudi Arabia's modern genealogical culture. It begins with a review of new historical evidence from the central Arabian oasis town of al-Ghāt, which reveals the way marital patterns preserve knowledge about premodern status hierarchies. It then considers Hamad al-Jāsir's use of marital patterns as a tool of lineal authentication, a practice epitomized in his study of a historically maligned Arabian tribe, Bāhila. It also shows how al-Jāsir made use of Arabian marital patterns as a form of ethnographic data that could serve as a basis for rehabilitating the reputation of historically maligned Arabian tribes and advancing a nativist ethical blueprint for modern Saudi society in which tribal and religious values could cohere harmoniously against perceived external threats.

This book examines why tribal genealogies continue to be a central facet of modern Saudi identity despite the erosion of kinship ties resulting from almost 300 years of religious conditioning, and despite the unprecedented material transformation of Saudi society in the oil age. It considers what accounts for the compulsion to affirm tribal belonging in modern Saudi Arabia by focusing on verse 49:13 of the Quran and the multiple contexts in which it is embedded in the kingdom. More specifically, the book asks why this verse is interpreted by so many Saudis as a license to assert their particularist tribal identities, while its ostensibly equalizing final clause is dismissed as an afterthought. It also explores the politicization of the Arabian oral culture by documenting the life and work of the Arabian genealogist and historian Hamad al-Jāsir.

This concluding chapter examines the notion that a genealogical rule of governance pervades Saudi Arabia in relation to Wahhabism and Islam. It suggests that Saudi Arabia's modern genealogical culture is a direct consequence of the rise of Salaf religiosity in the kingdom and that the acute genealogical consciousness of modern Saudi society is a form of bedouin tribal vengeance against modernity. Just as the economic paternalism of the Saudi state has influenced the discourse and strategies of al-Qaeda, the kingdom's economic model has played an important role in shaping its modern genealogical culture as well. The chapter also discusses Hamad al-Jāsir's genealogical project, which preceded the wholesale politicization of the Saudi oral culture, and argues that the attachment to the Arabian past that drove such project was real and visceral, rather than an ideological fetish encouraged or manufactured by the Saudi state.