This paper takes as its subject contemporary artwork in Saudi Arabia that revolves around memory and women. In particular, one collaborative artwork by a leading female artist, which has engaged women in three major cities of the nation, appropriates genealogical practices and narratives that are conventionally popular among men and characterize the kingdom’s “modern genealogical culture” (Samin 2013). This paper argues that despite their position in their own kinship genealogies, women want to be active in the national genealogy. Family trees in the kingdom tend to represent women as a fluid-like substance (Carsten 2004) that is passive at best and polluting at worst. Indeed, and especially among tribal families of the central region, women sully the purity of nasab or biological kinship through acts likes having affairs or marrying non-tribal men. Indeed, marriage to non-tribal men effectively ruins the chances of other female relatives to marry men of tribal lineage. An intimate ethnography of this collaborative artwork that has invited women in Khobar, Riyadh and Jeddah through participatory workshops to remember their mothers, grandmothers, aunts and older sisters, as well as the latter’s oral histories, brings to light gendered ways of remembering (see also King and Stone 2010). Workshops took place in urban centers since questions of remembering and relatedness are inseparable from the socio-political processes that accompany urbanism. More importantly, the ethnography reveals how women are eager to carve their names and those of their female ancestors into the leaves of the national genealogy. In fact, by drawing and sharing their own female-focused family trees and sawalif (stories), participants in this artwork seek to integrate mainstream nationalist narratives, rather than to remain outside those narratives or to create their own counter-narratives. The sawalif pertain to their national imaginaries and how their own female ancestors have contributed to nation-building processes in distant non-urban regions of the kingdom.

In this paper, I aim to explore how changing state and societal settings affect women’s everyday urban living and experiences in sex-segregated as well as mixed-gender public spaces in Saudi Arabia. Sex segregation in the public domain has become a cornerstone of the Saudi interpretation of Islam (Doumato, 2009). The sex segregation in the public domain that we encounter in Saudi Arabia does not relegate women’s participation to the realm of domesticity, but rather separates men and women in the public sphere. As such, it is a development that has led to the coming about of extensive separate public spheres, that are only for women and in which activities that are by women and for women take place (Doumato, 2009; Hamdan, 2005; Le Renard, 2008). The field of education was the first field in which separate ‘only for women’ public spaces were created, yet in 2009 the first ‘mixed’ university (KAUST, the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology) was opened, leading to an increasing debate about ‘mixing’ (ikhtilāṭ) between men and women. Focusing on the case study of segregation and ‘mixing’ at university, I will start with an examination of the historical trajectory of the development of sex-segregated educational institutions in the Kingdom. Then I will zoom in on the recent debates about the “mixed” KAUST. Finally, based on interviews with urban women with an active role in the public domain, I will explore their views about what are suitable ways for men and women to interact with each other and undertake activities in the public domain in their country, again by using the case of university education. As such, this case study will elucidate the practical resonances on women’s lives of the organization of public settings of everyday urban living.

Twentieth century urban history in Saudi Arabia’s East is tightly linked to the growth of the oil industry and therefore to the activities of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in developing the local urban communities. Existing historical and social studies univocally ascribe the ‘modern’ achievements of the early phase of oil development in the 1950s and 1960s, namely the building of an urban infrastructure, education and health system, to corporate activities. In fact, the oil company is presented as the dominant, if not the only, actor stipulating urban development, thus implementing the ‘modernization’ project of the Al Saud (Yizraeli 2012). Hence, oil urbanism is framed as mere product of corporate and state interests, oddly deprived of the role assumed by urban communities or individuals in this process (Seccombe and Lawless 1987; Thamir al-‘Ahmari 2006). In contrast to such unidirectional understanding of urban growth under the aegis of oil, this paper focusses on commercial entrepreneurs, government officials and civil servants in the oil towns Dammam and al-Khobar and the ways in which they fomented oil urbanism and ‘urbaneness’ from the 1940s to the early 1970s. Local merchants and investors did not only seek government and company loans and thus realized the introduction of new technologies and necessary infrastructure, such as an electric grit or medical services. They also extended their scope of activity into urban governance and culture, where they monitored the urban socio-political situation and exerted considerable influence over urban life and development. At times, members of prominent business families such as the al-Gosaibi or the al-Dossary acted as social entrepreneurs or advocates of less privileged urban groups, possibly nourishing an older role within the urban communities. Government officials and civil servants of the municipality, on the other hand, seemed to have used their leverage as intermediates between the urban communities and the state to promote specific social or political agendas, backed up by an evolving public opinion. By examining documents of the municipal and provincial administration, reports compiled by foreign monitors such as Aramco’s government relations department and the US consulate, local newspapers, published memoirs, and oral history interviews, the paper will retrace forms of civic engagement among these groups and locate the formal and informal spaces and boundaries that defined these activities.

One of the most famous examples of civic engagement in the popular memory of Jeddah is the al-Falah school. It was founded by a member of the one of the leading merchant families, Muhammad Ali Zaynal, in 1905, who later established branches in Mecca, Bahrain, Dubai, and Bombay. Allegedly, the school was founded as a distinctive civic initiative to counter the Ottoman language instruction at the Ottoman middle school, or rüşdiyye, that had been established in 1876. Today, it is being remembered as a bold initiative which was initially forbidden by the Ottomans, continued clandestinely for a few years before being legalised. The school was soon supported financially by other leading merchants of the town and is said to have trained the leading personalities of Jeddah during the first half of the 20th century. Indeed, it exists to this day and, although by now financed by the state, is still supported by the founding family. Schools in the early 20th century were normally more than mere centres of instruction but provided an important locus of political socialisation. The memoirs of Zafir al-Qasimi show this convincingly for Maktab Anbar in late 19th and early 20th century Damascus (for the voluminous secondary literature developing this theme, c.f. the bibliography of Deguilhem-Schoem's article on the school in REMMM 52-53, 1989). In contrast, we know hardly anything about the cultural and educational life in late Ottoman, Hashemite and early Saudi Jeddah, in spite of the pioneering works of Ochsenwald (notably his 1991 article on Arabism in the Hijaz). The importance of the Falah school in the popular memory and local histories serves, however, as a first indicator of a role that went well beyond a mere educational establishment, although in which ways will need to be explored further in this paper. Documents pertaining to the school, local histories and memoirs, writings (mostly newspaper articles) about the founder and the school as well some Ottoman documents on the competing rüşdiyya will be used to investigate the role of the Falah-school as a site of civic engagement in Jeddah and explore its potential in the cultural formation of its youth from its founding days until the 1950s.