Riyadh March 8-10

In Riyadh on Sunday March 8 I hung out at the hotel, chatting with other book fair guests and getting caught up on email and internet browsing. In the afternoon I went to the book fair, and attended the two evening cultural panels on women in literature and on intellectual property. The book fair had hundreds of booths for publishers from all around the Arab world, but none from anywhere else, except for a small booth for Brazil, which was being highlighted this year. The exhibition hall was a large, fully servicable, but strictly utilitarian building, a contrast to all of the other ornate public buildings I have seen in Riyadh.

The book fair

Back at the hotel, I had dinner and extended conversation with other book fair guests, assorted Ministry of Culture people and members of the Saudi consultative assembly; we had a very interesting discussion about intellectual property, including what was the best Arabic translation for “creative commons”.

The next day Monday March 9 in the morning I went with some of the book fair guests to the National Museum and then the National Archives building, two more fancy public buildings. In the afternoon I went to al-Dar‘iyah, the first Saudi capital a short distance out of Riyadh. The long-abandoned mud brick town is undergoing large scale development as a tourist heritage site. We saw an exhibit and then a small portion of the site under reconstruction. I went to al-Dar‘iyah with some Saudi women from the Ministry of Culture as the only man in the group.

The Saudi women’s group at al-Dar‘iyah

I have not been in Saudi Arabia long enough yet to understand the rules for mixing or segregating the sexes. Mostly, the sexes are completely segregated, as for example at the book fair, where there are times for men only. For the cultural panel discussions, the women were seated at the back of the tent-like hall, behind a partition. The panel discussions were broadcast via closed-circuit television into the women’s section; the woman speakers were in the back women’s section and only their voices were broadcast into the men’s section.

My session on Jerusalem was that evening, after an earlier session about Tayyib Saleh, the recently deceased Sudanese author. I spoke in Arabic for 15 minutes about what has not yet been studied about Jerusalem. Adnan al-Bakhit, from Jordan, Muhammad Ghosheh, my Palestinian colleague, and another woman, were the other guest speakers in my session. I had dinner back at the hotel, before leaving for the airport for my flight to India, the next segment of my travels.

Given all of the elaborate and ornate public buildings in Riyadh, the airport is oddly utilitarian and cramped for space. At roughly the same time in the early hours of the morning there are flights to Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Calcutta and Columbo, so the much too narrow space between the security x-ray machines and the check-in counters was filled to overflowing with hoards of people and luggage, in the worst case of airport congestion I have experienced. I was virtually the only non-South Asian to be seen and I was the only non-Indian on the flight to Hyderabad.

Riyadh March 6-7

On March 6 I arrived in Riyadh at 6:30 pm on my flight from Amman; I think I was the only Westerner on the Saudi airlines flight. This was my second trip to Saudi Arabia, after last year’s excavation. I was met by people from the Ministry of Culture who whisked me through formalities and took me to the very nice Holiday Inn hotel. After checking in, I soon went to the Riyadh Book Fair, where each evening there is a culture program with panels of guest speakers. I met various Ministry of Culture people who had made the arrangements for me to come, including Abdulaziz Alsebail, the Saudi deputy minister of culture. After the book fair closed at 10:00, I had dinner and long conversation at the hotel with other guest speakers of the book fair. Almost all of the other book fair guest speakers were Arabs; one other Westerner was Phillipe Aigrain, an authority on intellectual property.

The next day, Saturday March 7, I hung out at the hotel until we left for the afternoon activities. The dozen or so guests of the Riyadh Book Fair were all invited to attend an awards ceremony for best translations to or from Arabic at the King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Public Library. As with many public buildings in Riyadh, the library is a remarkably posh and ornate building. After the ceremony, Phillipe Aigrain and I were ushered into a dining room, where we enjoyed an elaborate banquet spread. But only when we had finished eating, did our minders realize that we were supposed to be with the rest of the group attending a reception in another room. So we went to the reception for a while, before the main event of the afternoon got underway – a royal audience and luncheon banquet with King Abdullah.

We were taken to a large audience hall in the royal palace compound, which was the most opulent building I have ever seen, with an extraordinary colored glass and gold encrusted ceiling. I regret not having better pictures to show (photos are courtesy of Phillipe Aigrain).

The ceiling of the audience hall

We hung out for about an hour until King Abdullah arrived with his entourage of incense-swinging attendants and assorted courtiers. There were several hundred people in attendance, including participants in a national heritage and folk culture festival. We listened to a sycophantic speech and poetry recitation and then King Abdullah said a few words of welcome. Then we all lined up to shake the king’s hand, before we went to the adjoining dinning hall.

King Abdullah in the hand-shaking line

The banquet was the most elaborate meal I have ever had, although I was full from the previous lavish spread of a couple of hours earlier. There were some 350 people at the luncheon, twenty to a table, and all men except for two women – Najat al-Milad, a guest speaker for the book fair from Tunisia and the other the wife of another one of the book fair guest speakers. The guests were served by swarms of servants. A connoisseur of such royal banquets told me that this banquet was a bit off the peak – it seems that the main meat course was not as good as it could have been; also I must say that the servants were a tad slow getting the soup served. The meal entailed prodigious wastage of food; I observed similar wastage at the various other banquets I attended this trip. The banquet did not take all that long. All in all the banquet was the most interesting new cultural experience of the trip.

The banquet invitation

The banquet menu

Phillipe Aigrain, Najat al-Milad, and Abdulaziz Alsebail, the Saudi deputy minister of culture, at the banquet.

Later that evening I went with two other book fair participants to the King Fahd cultural center, for the opening session of a French-Saudi conference on intercultural dialogue, which consisted of forgettable speeches. The cultural center was yet another exceptionally ornate building. That evening back at the hotel I felt no need for dinner, after the two banquets that afternoon.

Jerusalem and Amman March 1-6

At the beginning of March I started a new round of international travel. The first hurdle to be overcome was getting an extension of residency from the Israeli Ministry of the Interior that would enable me to leave the country without a hassle at the border, since my three-month tourist visa had expired on February 10. Their approval came though in the nick of time and I got the necessary stamp in my new US passport on the morning of March 2. Within about an hour I was on my way to Jordan.

I arrived in Amman to attend the annual two-day conference on March 3-4 of the Arab Thought Forum, this year about “al-Quds fi Damir”, which translates clumsily as “Jerusalem in Conscience”. The Arab Thought Forum (Muntada al-Fikr al-‘Arabi) attracts an international Arab audience, and I was the only non-Arab in attendance. The two days were heavily focused on the contemporary political situation in Jerusalem, with Prince Hasan doing a lot of the talking. Again I was the odd-ball with my non-political ten-minute presentation in Arabic on research topics about the Islamic heritage of Jerusalem that warrant future attention, such as architectural documentation of Muslim buildings in the Old City and study of archival documents.

One impression I received from my conversations with the other participants was how strong the idea has taken hold that denies any historical reality to the existence of an ancient Israelite state. It seems that David and Solomon, if not Abraham as well, were somewhere vaguely in the Arabian peninsula, but certainly not in the land of Canaan, which as everyone knows was inhabited by Arabs from the beginning. The failure of Israeli archaeologists to find any trace of Solomon’s temple in their excavations beneath the al-Aqsa Mosque is a source of ridicule, confirming that Jewish claims are bogus. The evidence for Jews in Second Temple times or the later Roman and Byzantine periods is of no interest. I have come across such ideas before, which I considered as representing a lunatic fringe, but it seems that these ideas are becoming more main stream, reflecting an embittered response to such Israeli actions as their recent decision to demolish numerous Arab houses in the Silwan neighborhood to expand the City of David archaeological park.

While in Amman I got my visa for Saudi Arabia, which was waiting for me in the Saudi consulate (stamped into my second US passport with no Israeli stamps), and got my ten-year visa for India transferred from my old passport to my new one. So the last bureaucratic arrangements for the rest of my trip fell into place. After spending a day at ACOR, the American research center in Amman, I left on a flight to Riyadh on March 6 to attend the Riyadh Book Fair.

Jerusalem February 1-28

During February I continued my NEH fellowship at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem. Most work days I was in the Islamic Museum on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, cataloguing the Arabic inscriptions in the museum. I gave a presentation at the Albright Institute on February 19 about this research project.

I also gave a public lecture about Christian Identifications of Muslim Buildings in Medieval Jerusalem, in which I spoke about the odd and humerous Biblicizing or Christianizing identifiations that Western Christian pilgrims gave to Muslim buildings, such as the Houses of the Rich Man and Lazarus in the parable of Luke 16:19-31. This was the fourth time I have given that public lecture, and it has always been very well received. My lecture on February 4 was at the newly renovated Swedish Studies Center just inside Jaffa Gate.

An 18th-century Franciscan plan showing the Stations of the Cross in the Jerusalem. Some of the buildings shown are actually Muslim-built structures.

I have also been working on an English edition of a big picture book about the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. On February 12 there was a book launch function for the Arabic version by my Palestinian colleague Muhammad Ghosheh at the National Hotel across the street from the Albright, and I said a few words about why I thought the book was worth translating. The English version should be published in April.

Much of the month was taken up with an attempt to get an extension from the Ministry of the Interior to stay in Israel beyond the end of my current three-month tourist visa. That would have been easy to do, but my application was rejected because my passport expires in mid-June, i.e. less than six months after I intend to leave Israel in early April. So I had to go to the US consulate in East Jerusalem to submit an application for a new passport. New US passports are all processed in Washington, so it took 13 days for the new one to be delivered. Then I went back to the Ministry of the Interior, optimistically expecting straightforward approval, only to have the supervisor freak out about how often I have been coming to Jerusalem – in the last ten years typically a couple of times each year for a week or so. At the end the supervisor agreed to my request, but I would still need to get approval, which might take a week.

I also met Nikolas Jaspert, a visiting German professor who was around for a week giving some class periods for the German students at the Dormition. I spent an afternoon with him, showing him around the Old City. I also took part in the Albright field trip with Dan Bahat to the Western Wall tunnels and in the Albright field trip to the Haram al-Sharif. Khader Salameh, my colleague from the Islamic Museum, had made arrangments for the group to get into the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque building, and it turned into a great opportunity to take photographs without getting hassled by the Muslim guards.

A mihrab in a side room of the al-Aqsa Mosque building

A detail of the recently installed replica of the pulpit of Salah al-Din in the al-Aqsa Mosque building.

I also went one day with Susan Graham, a fellow at the Albright, and Khader to the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer to see the building and the excavation area from the 1970s below the church. It had taken quite a while to make arrangments to see the excavation area below the church, but I understand that there are plans to soon make it accessible to the general public.

Khader and Susan on the roof of the Church of the Redeemer

I also attended a conference about Urbanism at the Givat Ram campus of Hebrew University and then a second conference at Tel Aviv University about the archaeology of the Negev. At both conferences one of the speakers was Donald Whitcomb, the Islamic period archaeologist from the University of Chicago, whom I had not met for some years.

On that trip to Tel Aviv I went with Susan Graham and Steven Werlin from the Albright to get visas from the Jordanian Embassy that enable one to cross the Allenby / King Hussein Bridge into Jordan. The staff at the Jordanian Embassy processes applications on the spot, making at least this one application process extraordinarily quick and easy.