The incursion of imperialism in the Arabian Peninsula: ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Munīf’s novel “Cities of Salt”

For decades, Saudi Arabia’s servitude to the USA was an important pillar of US dollar dominance and thus of US imperialism. Oil could only be settled in dollars and so the demand for this currency was inexhaustible. However, after almost 90 years the era of the petrodollar now seems to be coming to an end. The states of the Arabian Peninsula have recently begun to act more self-confidently according to their own interests. Increasingly, they are turning their attention to the East and not just to the West, trying to intensify economic relations with various regions of the world. Indeed, it’s not by coincidence that the new beginning of relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which may bring economic prosperity and peace, has been achieved with the help of Chinese and Omani diplomacy.
  In this context, it is well worth illuminating the beginning of the relationship between the countries of the Arabian Peninsula and the USA: the incursion of imperialism in the Arabian Peninsula.
  On this topic, there is a very readable novel by the Saudi Arabian writer ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Munīf’s (1933–2004) entitled “Cities of Salt”, first published in Arabic in 1984. “Cities of Salt” is the first volume of a series of five novels with the same overall Arabic title “Mudun al-milḥ” (Cities of Salt). This first volume has been translated into Western languages and is thus accessible to non-Arabic-speaking readers. Munīf is considered one of the most important Arabic novelists and one of the most remarkable personalities in contemporary world literature. Along with the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner for literature Naǧīb Maḥfūẓ, he is considered one of the two patriarchs of Arabic literature. However, Munīf’s popularity remained limited to the Arab world, his work being only partially translated into European languages. This lack of resonance in the Western language area is hardly coincidental for one of the most renowned Arab novelists and public intellectuals.
  In his work, ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān Munīf reveals the historical lies on which the Saʿūd dynasty built its legitimacy and portrays its constant servility to foreign rulers and its sabotage of any economic or political efforts for independence at home and in the Arab world. In doing so, he also critiques the role of the West in suppressing any social progress in the region.

Futile hopes for a positive impact of the oil industry

The author himself describes the book as dealing with “the long and difficult labour that accompanied the emergence of the oil industry in the Arabian Peninsula […], and how it was hoped that this resource, […] would give a positive outlook to the future of generations to come.”¹ Unfortunately, things turned out differently.
  Historically, it all began with the awarding of concessions for oil drilling to the American oil company Standard Oil of California SOCAL in May 1933. The American company had offered the then heavily indebted King Ibn Saʿūd more than the British competitors. Subsequently, the close alliance between the Saudi rulers and the USA shaped further political and economic development. Moreover, it contributed to the Arabian Peninsula remaining culturally and socially backward for decades. The opportunities that the wealth of oil could have brought to the people of the Arabian Peninsula remained unrealised due to the backwardness of the ruling regimes in the oil-producing countries and the complicity and egoism of the Western countries.
  As regards content, Munīf presents the history from the point of view of ordinary people who are exposed to a traumatic social process shaking the society of the Arabian Peninsula as a result of the oil discoveries. The old tribal structures are destroyed with tanks and secret police, gigantic corruption meets political oppression, extreme consumerism is merging with bigotry and hypocrisy. Asked about the title in an interview, Munīf explains: “Cities of salt means cities that offer no sustainable existence. When the waters come in, the first waves will dissolve the salt and reduce these great glass cities to dust. In antiquity, as you know, many cities simply disappeared. It is possible to foresee the downfall of cities that are inhuman.”² The period of action of the first volume can be set concretely between 1933, the time of the first discovery of oil in the Arabian oasis ʿAin Dār, to 1953, the strike events in the Arabian port city of Ẓahrān. Nevertheless, the novel has something timeless and universal.

In the tradition of Arab storytellers

Munīf refrains from depicting a single main character. Instead, he takes the reader into a juxtaposition of personal fates that all of them are connected to each other. This puts him in the tradition of Arab storytellers. Munīf deals with issues such as the incursion of modernity and technology into a pre-modern culture, cultural uprooting and cultural hegemony, and the establishment of authoritarian structures in relationships, as exemplified by the lives of the members of a human community that is shaken to its foundations by the discovery of oil.
  The beginning of “Cities of Salt” is set in an oasis in the middle of the Arabian desert, where a Bedouin community lives a traditional life in harmony with its environment. It is their belonging to a community that gives the inhabitants a sense of strength and security. Years of plenty alternate with years of hardship. But the inhabitants of the Wādī enduring the difficult conditions that nature demands of them lead a content life because they are a community in which individuals support each other. Suddenly, however, strangers appear in the oasis and the lives of its inhabitants will be changing fundamentally. These strangers, Christians who speak Arabic besides, what do they want? They claim to be looking for water. The villagers are suspicious. “They were busy all day long. They went to places no one dreamed of going. They collected unthinkable things. They had a piece of iron – no one knew what it was or what they did with it – and when they returned in the evening, they brought with them bags of sand and pieces of rock. […] That was not all: They placed wooden markers and iron poles everywhere they went, and wrote on them, and wrote things no one understood on the sheets of paper they carried with them everywhere.”³
  The Bedouins don’t know that they are dealing with American explorers searching for oil. The alien invades the lives of the people with full force: “Within days everything in the Wādī al-Ujun changed – men, animals and the nature – for no sooner hat the American, his friends and their companions been settled in than a large number of other people arrived. No one had ever dreamed such people existed: one was short and obese with red hair and another was tall enough to pick dates from the trees. Yet another was as black as night, and there were more – blond and readheaded. They had blue eyes and bodies fat as slaughtered sheep, and their faces inspired curiosity and fear.”⁴ Rhythm of life is changing. The residents of the oasis have never seen anything like this before. A camp is built, wire fences are being put, machines roar and terrify all the inhabitants.

No regard for the customs of the locals

The foreigners have no regard for the customs of the locals. When the latter finally complain to their emir, it turns out that he has done business with the Americans. In the end, the inhabitants of the oasis are concerned about their freedom; they don’t want anyone telling them what they may or may not do. The emir, however, doesn’t pay heed to them any more. He has sold out to the foreigners and no longer represents the interests of his own tribe. He was lured with the promise of wealth and power, and finally was given a radio, a telephone and a telescope with which he can look at half-naked American women on one of their ships off the coast all day. In an expressive way, Munīf describes the destruction of the oasis as tractors “attacked the orchards like ravenous wolves, tearing up the trees and throwing them to the earth one after another, and levelled all the orchards between the brook and the fields. […] The trees shook violently and groaned before falling, cried for help, wailed, panicked, called out in helpless pain and then fell entreatingly to the ground, as if trying to snuggle into the earth to grow and spring forth alive again.”⁵ The butchery had begun, and it continued until everything was gone.

Expulsion from paradise

The oasis is destroyed and with it the source of life for its inhabitants. The source of their life has to make way for an oil production plant. The once proud inhabitants are expelled from their paradise and wander around aimlessly. Their fate will be despair, disease and even death. Those who stay to work as labourers in the newly built camp will not fare better. They live crowded together in tents and barracks. The once free people are degraded to work slaves.
  Some of the inhabitants who are able to work head for the coastal town of Harran, which is intended by the American occupiers as an oil port. A new narrative thread begins here. This is another place where imperialism, in the form of the oil industry, is hitting the inhabitants. Their houses are demolished to make way for a camp. The villagers are housed in tents on a neighbouring hill. They have to sell their most valuable possessions, their camels and stallions. More and more authoritarian structures and behaviour have become the norm, especially in the relationship between the Americans and the Arabs. The Arabs are the new slaves of the Americans. The Americans behave as if they were the masters, they force the Arabs to work hard, they disregard and mock them. Work slaves from all over the world are now being hired to work for any meagre wage. They are locked up in the camps, which are secured with barbed wire. They are fingerprinted. There is no more direct contact between the Americans and the workers. Everything runs through the so-called administration of staff, that is, through Arab collaborators of the Americans and the corrupted emir.

A community of equals – corroded by power

In an intensely moving way, the author describes the personal fates of individuals seeking their fortunes in Ḥarrān. Munīf succeeds masterfully in arousing sympathy in the reader for the lost existences in this merciless place. The reader can adopt the perspective of these people and thus live along with them. And that’s what gives this novel its value. It enables the reader to change the perspective and thus, to perceive these individuals as fellow human beings. So, the reader sympathises with the obvious losers of the changing social conditions, but also with the supposed winners. In this more and more capitalist society, the most valuable aspect that characterised the old tribal relationship of the Arabs is lost, the perception of belonging to a community of equals. It is giving way to a class society in which all relationships are pervaded and eventually corroded by power. However, the profoundly authoritarian and racist American model of supremacy cannot completely prevail, as it contradicts the cultural sensibilities of these people - and also human nature. In the end, the workers revolt. The peaceful protest, however, is bloodily suppressed with the help of the Americans. The emir goes mad and is taken to an unknown place.
  Munīf’s novel reinforces compassion for these people. However, the author is concerned with more than that. Elsewhere he remarks: “At the end of the twentieth century, with the majority of the world’s resources under its control, the United States now intend to dominate and control the intellect and thought as well.”⁶ His work bears witness to an intellectual who has both understood and illuminated the problem of hegemony in all its aspects and who is absolutely clear in rejecting the hegemonic aspirations of the Western powers. A book that is well worth reading in every respect. It is available in English.  •

¹ Munīf, ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān. Baina aṯ-ṯaqāfa wa-s-siyāsa (Between culture and politics). Casablanca: Al-markaz aṯ-ṯaqāfī al-ʿarabī. 1998, p. 133 (translated from arabic)
² Ali, Tarik. “Exile and the Kingdom“. In: The Nation of 1 March 2004. (2004), p. 34
³ Munīf, ʿA., Cities of Salt (1987), p. 30
⁴ Ibid., p. 67
 Munīf, ʿA., Cities of Salt (1987), p. 106
⁶ Munīf, ʿAbd ar-Raḥmān. Baina aṯ-ṯaqāfa wa-s-siyāsa (Between culture and politics). Casablanca: Al-markaz aṯ-ṯaqāfī al-ʿarabī. 1998, p. 6/7 (translated from arabic)