This photograph was made in the spring of 1978 on my 10th visit to Afghanistan. I was 31, and I had two degrees in religious studies. In Afghanistan there was a word for a traveling religious scholar. Christians and Jews had been among these travelers for centuries; I was welcomed almost everywhere.
I chose to work not as a scholar or a journalist but as an artist. I went out each morning open to what Afghanistan could show me, instead of trying to illustrate ideas that I already had in mind. When I took this image, two weeks before the Communists came to power, we were two days’ ride from the nearest paved road.
Between 1989 and 2000 this was one of the 32 images in the exhibition “The Afghan Folio” that was shown in more than 120 museums and galleries in the us and Canada. When it showed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev saw it and had it exhibited in Moscow. More than a million visitors saw it in 1989 alone. After 2001 bookings ceased, and it has not been shown since 2008.
—Luke Powell
Afghan Gold. Luke Powell.
2013, Steidl Books, 978-3- 86930-648-3, €98, hb.
In the summer of 1974, Jack and Bernice Shaheen granted their kids a few hours on Saturday mornings for what was then an American children’s ritual: watching television cartoons, like Popeye the Sailor and Bugs Bunny, and staged, cartoonish battles among the characters of professional wrestling. It was all, they thought, innocent entertainment.
Jack Shaheen, who passed away in 2017, was then a professor of mass communications at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, a town of 20,000. As an academic, he analyzed society and culture in media, but he wasn’t prepared for one July morning when six-year-old Michael and five-year-old Michele “came running up the steps saying, ‘Daddy, Daddy, they’ve got bad Arabs on,’” he remembers. He went back with them to the tv, where wrestlers called “Akbar” and “Abdullah the Butcher” were on the bill, and an announcer played up their menace. “Akbar likes to hear the cracking of bones,” the announcer said, “and when he makes those faces, he is ugly, ugly!”
Shaheen’s response was to give Michael and Michele an assignment as “monitors” of Saturday morning cartoons “looking for bad, evil Arabs.” They soon pointed out plenty: shows starring Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and a cascade of other cartoon characters all featured occasional Arabs—nearly always as villains of one ilk or another.
Shaheen realized his children and other Arab-Americans “were growing up without ever having seen a humane Arab in a children’s cartoon.” From their viewing, he says, “came the idea to write an article about this.”
That day, it turned out, changed Shaheen’s life. Over the next eight years, the project grew and grew. Bernice joined him, and the two Shaheens took notes on hundreds of cartoons, sitcoms, dramas and documentaries, all having something to do with Arabs. From dramatic characters to news subjects to the butt of comedy laugh lines, the images were overwhelmingly negative and stereotyped.
Along the way, Shaheen also began collecting books, comics, toys, games and even “shaykh” Halloween masks and bumper stickers—anything he could find that mirrored popular culture’s images of Arab people.
This led not only to his 1984 book The TV Arab, one of the first published studies of Arab images in American media, but also to a one-of-a-kind collection, an archive that grew to include more than 3,000 television and film titles, what Shaheen calls the “hard evidence” of pop culture’s stereotyping of Arabs and—especially after 9/11—Muslims. For nearly 40 years, Shaheen kept his collection at home—in bookcases, on shelves, piled on the floor and even stashed behind furniture—“anywhere I could find a spot,” he jokes.
But in 2011, what is now the Jack G. Shaheen Archive became a public resource, housed at the Tamiment Library’s Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, at New York University (nyu), where Shaheen himself is now a distinguished visiting scholar, and professors and young scholars are using his collection for new research.
In 2012, nyu organized examples from the archive on a series of two-meter-tall panels to produce the first public exhibit to draw on the collection. “A Is for Arab” has been shown at more than a dozen universities, high schools and other venues around the us, among them the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. It took its title from The Book of Sounds ABC, a children’s reader Shaheen found at a garage sale in the 1970s. On the first page explaining the letter “A,” the book illustrates a cartoon scene full of people and objects. At the center is a plump, garrulous, mustachioed Arab man on a mule with an axe hanging on his belt. “The mule is eating an apple,” the book explains. “It makes the Arab very angry…. How many words start with a?”
From such trivia, the full exhibit traces the both troubling as well as newly hopeful arc of America’s imagining of Arab people: from Arab men as not only angry but also backward, conniving and degenerate (especially as sultans) and Arab women as submissive temptresses relegated to harems, up to the more recent, stereotype-breaking scripts and characters by young filmmakers, producers, graphic novelists and others whose creativity portends positive change.
“Historically, there has been no documentation of these stereotypes, and when you talk about stereotypical images of Arabs, you have to have the evidence,” says Shaheen, sitting in the living room of his home in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where he has lived since 1995. “The beauty and strength of the collection is that it’s in all areas of popular culture—everything from tv wrestling to comic books to toys and games.” The stereotyping, he says, “is everywhere, like a virus.”
The evidence in the archive, Shaheen and nyu scholars say, can now become a centerpiece for public and scholarly discussions about how Arabs and Muslims are portrayed not just in the us but also around the world. Both the negative and the positive images are important, Shaheen and other scholars say, because it’s through the repetition of images that pop culture produces widespread assumptions about all groups of people. For non-Arabs and non-Muslims, they say, the repetition of images from an early age becomes a proxy for people they may never meet personally.
“For most of us, that is the way we interact with that world, not by going [to Arab- and Muslim-majority countries] but by consuming it in different ways, whether through toys and tv shows or news items,” says Helga Tawil-Souri, director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and associate professor of media, culture and communications. “We come to be trained to think of Arabs and Muslims as ‘X, Y and Z.’ And those X’s, Y’s and Z’s are precisely what Shaheen tries to show.”
The archive, which in 1984 began with some 200 tv and movie titles, now has approximately 3,200 video titles, along with about 20 16-millimeter films, 35 audio cassettes, 50 movie posters and stills, 400 editorial cartoons, 200 hardcover and paperback books, 150 comic books, 24 children’s books, 36 toys and games, 50 print ads from magazines and newspapers, 12 pulp magazine photos and an assortment of miscellany; other scholars have recently added collections of novels and nonfiction. There are silent films from the late 1800s, and there is what was for a time the only surviving copy of British filmmaker Malcolm Clarke’s Terror in the Promised Land, a documentary that aired on abc in 1978 that Shaheen says was one of the first to put a human face on Palestinian history.
“After the film was shown,” Shaheen says now, “all copies were destroyed. I had the only copy. A couple of years ago, Malcolm came to nyu, because his son was taking a class. And when his son found out that Terror in the Promised Land was in the archive, he told his father, and his father came. We screened it at the Middle East Studies Association, and he spoke about the film—how he had to have bodyguards, and how his life was threatened. That’s the value of the archive.”
After publication of The TV Arab, Shaheen continued, specializing in how filmmakers, TV executives, screenwriters and producers viewed Arabs and Muslims. In 2001 he published Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, and in 2008, Guilty: Hollywood’s Verdict on Arabs after 9/11.
Both books, and now the archive, help connect Hollywood’s early stereotyping to Europe’s 19th-century colonial characterizations. nyu scholars say this helps situate Arab and Muslim experiences amid the experiences of other groups, especially Asians, Jews and African Americans. Arabs and Muslims aren’t unique in being subject to grotesque caricatures, says Shaheen. “How many people accepted stereotypical images of Jews and blacks because that’s all they knew?” he asks. “It’s difficult to unlearn.”
But change is coming, Shaheen believes.
“I prefer to be part of the solution,” says Shaheen, sitting next to Bernice, who organized the archive’s catalog from the beginning.
If there has been any shift in the way Arabs and Muslims are portrayed over Shaheen’s 80 years, Shaheen himself deserves at least part of the credit. The TV Arab dovetailed with other groundbreaking books by Arab-American scholars, notably Edmund Ghareeb’s 1977 Split Vision: Arab Portrayal in the American Media and Edward Said’s 1981 Covering Islam. Together, they influenced a generation of scholars at a time when Shaheen’s own research in Hollywood led him to conclude, “Television executives permit the stereotype because they do not know much about Arabs or their nations. Nor have they taken the time to find out.”
A hint of change came in 1999, when Shaheen was first enlisted to consult on a major Hollywood film, Three Kings, starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube as us soldiers in the 1991 Gulf War who abandon their plan to steal gold and instead rescue Iraqi civilians. Then in 2005, Clooney personally called on Shaheen to advise on Syriana, which Clooney produced and starred in as a cia operative with an unwelcome assassination mission. In both films, Shaheen helped make Arab characters more humane: In Syriana, for example, Shaheen asked screenwriter/director Stephen Gaghan to make sure the Arab financier who is the assassination target had a family as part of his backstory—a seemingly simple change, but one that added moral complexity to a character who, decades earlier, would likely have been a flatly one-dimensional villain.
In addition, Shaheen’s documentary version of Reel Bad Arabs has screened at film festivals and aired on television in the Middle East and other regions outside the us. Shaheen is currently consulting on an animated children’s tv series called Shimmer and Shine about a girl with two comically fallible genies.
To Ella Shohat, a professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at nyu, the archive is a cultural mirror. “The archive is crucial because it’s not just about the collection,” Shohat says. “The archive ultimately is about those who generated it. With every type of reflection or image that imagines another region, it’s about those who imagined and less about those who are being imagined.”
Jack Tchen, founding director of nyu’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute, helped steer the archive to the university. As author of New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and co-author of Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, Tchen met Shaheen through a mutual friend and later visited Shaheen’s house in Hilton Head with a team of nyu colleagues. Tchen immediately saw the value of Shaheen’s collection in relation to another nyu archive: The Yoshio Kishi and Irene Yah Ling Sun Collection, which has more than 10,000 books, magazines, prints, posters, newspapers, advertisements, postcards, films, videos, audio recordings, comics and toys that document the stereotyped images of Asian Americans from the 1800s to the present.
“As a historian, I’ve looked at patterns as they’ve shifted over time, and of course with each generation, we hope [negative portrayals] go away, but it’s not been happening,” says Tchen, sitting in his nyu office a few minutes’ walk from Shaheen’s archive. “If anything, some of these older images of the evil Oriental—whether it’s Fu Manchu or the kind of dagger-wielding shaykh—are constantly coming back in new forms or in slightly updated old forms,” he says. “We can certainly say that there’s been progress in terms of how African Americans are represented in various media forms, but those stereotypes aren’t gone—they’re still deeply entrenched in the American imagination. These things aren’t quick to go away.”
Tchen says that the history of enmity in the us against what scholars call “the other”—anyone different, whether Arab, Muslim, Japanese, Chinese or from another “outsider” group—is often “tied to trade and foreign policy, and a feeling that this country is getting a raw deal.” Cultural portrayals of these groups in movies and on tv can be “an extension of the cowboy westerns, but instead of Indians, you have the Arab or ‘the Chinaman.’ The commercial culture’s relationship to the political culture is deeply intertwined.”
Shaheen argues that no matter how deeply entrenched the images may be, change in Hollywood is “inevitable”—even as movies continue in 2016 to traffic all too often in gross stereotypes and to push Arabs into villain roles. He points to a new generation of independent Arab filmmakers: Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot); Rolla Selbak (Three Veils); Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea); Cherien Dabis (Amreeka) and more, all of them pushing in exactly the other direction, just as movies with African American characters and images pushed back over the past 30 years. Arab and Muslim filmmakers—and filmgoers—will, Shaheen says, change the world.
This does not mean, Shaheen says, that every image of Arabs and Muslims should be or will be positive, but that Arabs and Muslims can be shown “in all their complexity, no better and no worse than they portray others.” The ways people consume media may have changed drastically since that Saturday when Shaheen’s kids called out to him, but the standards by which one can judge fairness, he says, are the same: Is the work substantive and insightful? Are there moments that humanize an Arab or Muslim character? Are there scenes that explore complexity in Arab and Muslim culture and society? And does the storyline avoid caricatures, stereotypes and easy answers?
Standing in his office, Shaheen points to still more welcome additions, now in his collection at home: Taxi for Tobruk, a 1961 French film about soldiering in the North African desert during World War ii, now out on dvd, and I’m Not a Terrorist, But I’ve Played One on TV, the 2015 memoir by Persian-American comedian Maz Jobrani. He also compliments the tv series Quantico, which includes two Arab sisters. “None of the characters are one-dimensional,” says Shaheen.
Shaheen says he will be happy—well, sort of happy—to stop collecting. “People write, ‘Have you seen this?’ And then I’m watching a movie on tv.”
“He’s still collecting,” Bernice intervenes, laughing a bit.
“I can’t stop,” says Shaheen. “To be honest with you, if I lived in New York, I’d be with the collection every day. There’s so much there. I’d find something that happened in the past and link it to what’s happening in the present.”
That job, now, is for others. By donating the archive, Shaheen ensured it will have impacts for generations.
“I’m still an optimist despite everything,” Shaheen says. “That blockbuster film or tv show, that one with positive, memorable, complex Arab characters, it’s coming. Believe me, it’s coming. There’s more awareness now. When I first started th is, I was all alone. That’s not true anymore. There are students writing dissertations. Courses are being taught on the image of Arabs. It was always my dream that there’d be young people picking up the torch and moving forward. And so like Hollywood always says, it’s coming soon to a theater near you.”
“But when I saw people surfing and my brothers took it up, I knew I had to try it,” says the 18-year-old, who grew up in the town of Tamraght on Morocco’s Atlantic coast and has claimed the women’s surfing title three years in a row. “I like challenges and experimenting with different surfing techniques. Fortunately, I’ve had the support of my family. That’s been a really big help.
“I feel so happy when I am out there on the waves,” she adds. “It just makes me forget anything that might be bothering me.”
Ocean swells have been rolling in off the Atlantic to break on Morocco’s 3,450-kilometer coast for eons. Fishermen have caught sardines, mackerel, anchovies, octopus and squid for centuries, usually from small, colorful wooden boats. Their offspring have been going to sea with their elders for countless generations, playing in the ocean when they had the chance. But it was only in the last 50 years that surfers discovered that the waves breaking along Morocco’s reefs, rocks and beaches were ideal for their own modern mix of work and play.
At first, locals say, it was mostly Europeans and Australians, along with the odd American or two, who discovered that from October into March, the Moroccan coast became a paradise of “big rollers” that produced excellent “right-handers,” or waves that break off points like Devil’s Rock, as well as good “beach breaks” and some “left-handers.” At some places such as Anchor Point north of Tamraght, waves break for so long surfers can ride for nearly half a kilometer.
In the past 20 years or so, surfing has caught on also with Moroccan youth, and this has produced some top professional riders, including Jérôme Sahyoun, a 35-year-old native of Casablanca who regularly rides 20-meter waves on the world circuit, and Ramzi Boukhiam, a 25-year-old from Agadir who won the 2012 European Surfing Championship. Along with them, thousands of others have embraced the sport and the surf culture that often goes with it, dreadlocks and all.
“Morocco is definitely on the rise in the international scene,” says Dave Prodan, a World Surf League (wsl) spokesman. “And the country is producing some pretty good surfers, too.”
Last September, the Royal Moroccan Surfing Federation, in conjunction with the wsl, hosted the country’s first major competition—the Quicksilver Pro Casablanca.
Mohammed Kadmiri is president of the Royal Moroccan Surfing Federation. He describes a sport that has grown “exponentially,” especially over the past decade. He says the country now has more than 245 surf instructors—all Moroccan—and 45 competition judges certified by the Federation. Numerous contests are held annually, and some attract top surfers from around the globe, he notes.
The long and often rugged coast, he adds, makes it a “natural paradise, a quintessential destination for surfing.” Add to that warm winter temperatures, large waves and a generous geography with at least 95 named “breaks,” it attracts hundreds of thousands of domestic and international surfers.
Kadmiri says he believes the first surfers on this coast were Americans stationed at what was then a us military base at Kenitra in northern Morocco in the early 1960s. They rode waves at nearby Mehdia beach, and from there, word of Morocco’s breaks began to spread around the globe.
Kadmiri himself learned to surf in 1984 at Oued Echarat north of Casablanca, and since then he has ridden waves around the world. In recent years, he says, the government of King Mohammed vi—whom he describes as an avid jet skier—has promoted surfing as recreation for young Moroccans and helped establish clubs along the coast. The government has also backed surf-related tourism, he explains, especially along the southern coast.
According to the World Tourism Organization, Morocco attracts 10 million tourists annually, the greatest number for any African country, and Kadmiri estimates that about 10 percent—nearly 1 million of those visitors—surf. GrindTV, an online adventure sports video channel, ranks Morocco among the top three places in the world for riding waves and learning the sport.
Kadmiri says the country now has at least 53 surfing schools run by Moroccans and another 50 surf camps headed by foreigners—mostly Europeans—who often use local instructors. He called surfing “a key indicator for tourism.”
El Gardoum, who started surfing at age 11, is among the handful of young Moroccan women who have also taken boards to the waves. She is already passing on her skills to the next generation, as she teaches youngsters like five-year-old Chamae El Bassiti how to ride—as well as offering tutoring with schoolwork.
“I like surfing with Meryem,” says Chamae, smiling up at her mentor as they sit on a stone wall. “She’s teaching me a lot and she’s fun to be around. I can stand on my board and I am starting to be able to turn. She’s also helping me learn how to read, too.”
Chamae’s mother, Zahira, runs a small tea shop on the beach, and she says she appreciates El Gardoum working with her daughter.
“I hope Chamae will be as good as Meryem when she grows up,” she admits with a smile. “Maybe she’ll even become a top pro surfer and can support me in my old age.”
El Gardoum has worked as an instructor for several of the surfing schools that focus on the surf at Devil’s Rock (called imourane in Berber) and Camel Beach (called jamal sha’ati in Arabic, because of its shape), and offer guide services to veteran surfers seeking out famed—and tricky—breaks called Boilers, Killers, Dracula’s and the famous Anchor Point.
On a misty October morning, small one-meter waves break onto Devil’s Rock beach near Tamraght. One class of kids in wetsuits and another still in street clothes warm up with jumping jacks and other calisthenics. Brightly painted blue fishing boats—some with cats lounging on their seats—are scattered on the beach, and a row of what could only be called surf shacks lines a ridge above. Behind them, rolling foothills of the nearby arid countryside touch sky. Tamraght, with the towers of two mosques, lies about a kilometer inland.
Out in the water, surfers have already begun to take advantage of waves that are pushed into the bay by the rocky point. Safir Lasim, who has surfed the region for more than two decades, steps out of his hut where he rents surfboards, stretches and wipes the sleep from his eyes. Nearby, another class, this one from Moroccan Surf Adventures, one of the oldest surfing schools in the region, is unloading surfboards from a van.
“Just another day on Taghazout Bay,” says Nigel Cross, Moroccan Surf Adventures co-owner. His father started a surfboard company in Britain and first surfed here in the 1970s together with Nigel’s mother, a swimsuit designer. Nigel was three years old.
“They were chasing the sun,” says Cross, who is now 42. “Places like Taghazout and Tamraght were just tiny fishing villages back then.”
Brahim LeFrere, one of Cross’s instructors, has been surfing for nearly half his 28 years and teaching since 2008. The son of a fisherman, he became good enough to compete in regional contests.
“In the beginning, it was too expensive for me to get a surfboard or a wetsuit,” he says. “So I’d wait until friends were done and I’d borrow their gear. After a year, I’d saved up enough money and bought a used board and wetsuit.”
A natural athlete, he also coached volleyball. “I like all kinds of sports that we can do on the beach—and in the water,” he says. “We have lots of space at low tide to play football, Frisbee and other things. Most of the people in my village were fishermen, and we all grew up on the sea, so playing in and on the waves just came naturally.”
Karim Rhouli, a 30-year-old who grew up in Marrakesh and now owns Marrakesh Surf and Snow Tours, says his parents often brought him to Taghazout Bay for holidays, where they would rent a house near Anchor Point.
“First I got into body boarding, but by the time I was 17, I really knew I wanted to surf,” explains Rhouli. As he improved his surfing, he began to teach. He also developed skills as a skateboarder and snowboarder, all of which led to the creation of his guide service.
“Surfing is a great sport because you feel like you are riding a force of nature when you are on a wave,” says Rhouli, who has surfed in Bali and Australia and taught snowboarding in Dubai. “That first rush of standing on a board and being carried in is incredible. It’s called ‘the stoke,’ and it grabs you and makes you want to do it more and more.”
Lasim Safir, who sports gold-tipped dreadlocks, rents surfboards and gives lessons from a small wooden building that also serves as his home above Devil’s Rock beach. He helped mentor El Gardoum, who stores her short board in his shack.
“There’s nothing I’d rather do than surf and help people learn,” says Safir, who is in his mid-30s and started surfing 15 years ago. “When I was a kid, there weren’t that many people who came to this beach. Now, sometimes, the waves can almost be crowded. But that’s good for business.”
Later that afternoon, El Gardoum drops by Safirs’s shack to grab her short board, slip on her wetsuit and head for the surf. Soon she is catching long rides and snapping sharp turns—maneuvers a short board makes possible. Upon finishing, she spots her favorite five-year-old surfing prodigy, Chamae, on the sidewalk—riding her skateboard. El Gardoum greets her with a big hug.
“She could be really good,” she says of Chamae.
“I didn’t begin until I was 11, so she has a big start on me,” she says with a laugh. “Like most kids, I began with swimming, and the next step was body boarding. Then I got on my cousin’s board, and he pushed me into the surf. I stood up and fell off, of course. But I knew right away that I’d like it.”
Now, she says Anchor Point is her favorite break because it produces consistent tubes and long rides.
With the backing of her parents, she says, she was soon competing and winning contests. With that came fame and sponsorships from companies interested in reaching the growing Moroccan market. When she’s not in school or playing other sports, she’s lifting weights that she says help make herself stronger for the constant paddling surfing requires.
“It’s just so much fun being out there, so it’s really not work. I like winning, but I know I can be a lot better. At the European championships in Casablanca [last fall], I surfed against French and Spanish girls and got an eighth-place finish because the competition is tough. Still, I also know I can surf better than a lot of guys.”
El Gardoum says she plans to go to university in Morocco or France to study science if she doesn’t pursue pro surfing. And in her free time, she plans to continue helping girls like Chamae.
“She already has her mother’s backing,” she says. “I would tell her and other girls to be strong, and don’t listen to people who want to hold you back. If surfing becomes their passion, like it has for me, they should go for it.”
This custom, known as al-raayah (“the banner”), centered on a woman’s holiday gowns: colorful, often ceremonial garments at the top end of her ensemble. Similarly to the coastal and townsfolk Dickson described, Bedouin women, too, would place a brightly colored thobe on a pole in front of the tent to welcome home a traveler or “when an important shaikh or personage is expected to arrive at or pass a camp,” wrote Dickson, one of the foremost Western experts on Bedouin life of the early 20th century.
In English, the Arabic word thobe translates simply as “garment.” Today, although it most often refers to the floor-length shirts, often of plain white, worn by men throughout the Arabian Peninsula, it is used also for what is nearly that shirt’s opposite: amply cut, colorful, often highly decorated robes worn by women inside the home or at parties of family or friends. Once commonly worn in almost as many styles as there are regions of the Peninsula, the women’s thobe is enjoying a fashion revival from Iraq and Kuwait down into eastern and central Saudi Arabia, as well as the coastal states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (uae) and parts of Oman.
All women’s thobes share a few basic characteristics: cuts that are large and square, or nearly square; side panels that open to form billowing sleeves (some with beautifully decorative gussets); and, in many varieties, length in back enough to trail on the floor.
Women wear such thobes over other layers, light or heavy depending on the season. (Wearing layers is a hallmark of Arabian women’s traditional dress.) For example, in the Najd region of central Saudi Arabia, as well as east to the Gulf coast, a woman would traditionally put on long pantaloons, gathered at the waist, called sirwal. On top of that, she wore a long gown with fitted sleeves but generally not “waisted” (tighter at the waist). These garments, too, have many regionally distinctive names: dishdasha, dira’a, miqta’ and kandurah; those with more defined waists were nafnuf or just gawan—after the English “gown.” This layer could be of sturdy cotton, lightweight wool, satin, polyester or silk, depending on the season, a woman’s social position, her lifestyle, and the fashion of the time and place.
It was on top of this that a woman pulled on the loose-fitting thobe. In some places, thobes did double duty both as holiday gowns and as more daily cover-ups. Designed for versatility, a thobe allows a woman to lift its neck opening to cover her head; alternatively, she can drape one or both sleeves over her head.
Like a living thing, fashion ebbs, flows and at times folds back on itself. The origins of the women’s thobe are unknown. Some look to its ancestry in the voluminous ceremonial over-garments worn in the courts of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, and others look back even farther, to Byzantine times.
Women wore thobes in so many places in the Arabian Peninsula that, over time, several styles developed. Among the Bedouin of central Saudi Arabia’s Najd region, thobes were made of dark cotton, sometimes decorated with colorful embroidery and strips of colored fabric sewn in, including natural silks in cerise, turquoise and gold. In the Najd’s towns and cities, as well those east in Kuwait and southern Iraq, women wore thobes of finer fabrics, such as black or red silk, tulle and touches of lace, with lavish gold and silver embroidery and sequins at the neckline, sleeves and hem.
In the past, local tailors and women at home sewed and embroidered most thobes, while the more elaborate ones came from tailors in India. These days, most thobes for sale in the Gulf are imports from India or made locally by Indian tailors.
Today in the Gulf region, if you stroll through malls, streets and markets where women’s attire is sold, you may catch a glimpse of an exceptionally brilliant-hued, heavily embroidered thobe. Whether it is a royal purple, a bright red or a rich lapis blue, it will be decorated in front from neckline to floor with a panel of intricate gold or silver embroidery: This is the elegant thobe al-nashal (or just thobe nashal), the signature women’s thobe style all the way from Kuwait into eastern Saudi Arabia, over to Bahrain and down to Qatar.
“The thobe nashal is the queen of thobes, in terms of its splendor and the density of its embroidery,” explains Mohamed Saleh, head of the Bahrain-based thobe manufacturer Saleh for Zari, in a Ministry of Culture video.
His company is one of a handful that not only designs and sews high-quality thobes, but also has imported and manufactured women’s thobes since 1950. It has several workshops, all in Bahrain. Prices start around $500, and the most customized thobe might cost up to $10,000.
One spring day last year, the firm’s showroom in downtown Manama’s Yateem Center mall was bustling with customers ordering thobes for Ramadan nights that would be full of visits among friends and families. In addition, it was wedding season, and Saleh was arranging deliveries to brides and their families for events like the traditional henna night, when the bride’s hands and feet are decorated, and for the wedding-night party itself. Typically, the bride and female wedding guests don different ensembles each night; the bride usually wears a white gown on her wedding night.
Switching amid Arabic, English and Hindi, Saleh carries on multiple conversations with his customers and staff. When there is a rare lull, he expounds on the history and styles of thobes in the region.
The simplest, he explains, is called a korar, which is worn every day at home by Bahraini and other Gulf women. It is made from cotton and polyester fabric in all kinds of patterns with chain-stitch embroidery at the neck opening and sleeves. Older women wear korars for formal occasions, and younger ones use them more informally.
No one, he says, not even historians, knows the true origin of the term “thobe al-nashal.” One meaning of nashal, he notes, is “pickpocket,” and thus he says he likes to think that it’s the thobe “so beautiful it steals your heart.”
And a “pure” thobe al-nashal just might do that, with its brilliant color and its front panel of dense gold and silver embroidery that reaches to the floor. But the name, he cautions, is tricky: There are endless variations. For example, in Najd, it might be called thobe mukhattam, a name that refers to its vertical bands of embroidery, but the cut is wider and the sleeves are longer, the easier to fold them back to show off the sleeve embroidery.
In Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, the manthur (“scattered”) style of embroidery is more common. Less ornate at the neckline, it drops down the front a meter or less. Since it uses less thread (which on the very best thobes is made of gold), and consequently less labor in ornamentation, it’s more affordable. The name actually refers to small embroidery motifs that are sewn all over the rest of the dress: paisleys, flowers, fanciful medallions, small circles or whatever a designer or customer fancies.
Bahrain is also famous for a striped thobe called mufahhah, named for the multicolored strips of fabric (fahhah) sewn together and embellished with embroidery and sequins. This echoes the style that townswomen and Bedouin in Najd sewed out of colorful remnants—only in the towns, they call it mutaffat, literally “taffeta’d,” or “the dress with taffeta.”
In Iraq, the thobe also goes by the name hashmi, which is possibly a reference to the country’s early 20th-century Hashemite rulers. In Kuwait, the traditional style was to make the garment from more sheer netted fabrics like tulle, and to sew a smaller embroidered panel in front. The neck opening also tended to be more open, rounded or with an elongated V-shape.
In the Emirates, women’s thobes are often made from patterned fabric, and there is little embroidery on the thobe itself. Instead, there is fancy embroidery on the tight sleeves of the dress underneath, the kandorah; another distinction is that the neck embroidery panel of Emirati thobes is often square.
On all types of thobes, the embroidery designs change much with the times. Decades ago, it was all about floral patterns and ornate medallions, as well as the crescent moon and star (hilal wa najmah). Today peacocks and butterflies appear on thobes. In the 1990s Saleh introduced fanciful curlicues called darb al-hayyah, or “snake trail.” These days, some customers even like to have a family name worked into the embroidery.
Paging through his photo album of custom orders, Saleh stops to point out one black thobe completely covered with small embroidered gold triangles. He calls this sumptuous (and very expensive, he adds) style sambusak, since the embroidery triangles are shaped like the savory pastries from which the name is taken.
Then he turns to a photograph of a rare gem: a thobe with a large triangle of gold embroidery at the base of the front. This, he says, is a thuraya (“Pleiades”) thobe. It is so named, he says, because the appearance of the star cluster in the sky in September marked both the end of summer and, more importantly for the woman wearing the thobe, the end of the pearl-diving season.
A century ago in Bahrain and Kuwait, diving for natural pearls took men to sea for several months each summer. When the pearling ships returned, the crews’ families greeted them on shore, the women and girls wearing their best thobes. According to Saleh, only the wives of the ship’s captains would wear a thuraya style, which was expensive; some even had gold coins sewn onto them.
In recent years, women’s thobes of various kinds have been turning up in modern places. At the 2012 Olympics in London, the female athletes from Bahrain wore three types in the opening parade: a nationally colored red manthur and two versions of the striped mufahhah. The 2009 short feature film The Good Omen by Bahrain director Mohammed Rashed Bu Ali took its title from a variation on the al-raayah or “banner” tradition of hoisting a woman’s thobe on a pole above a house to celebrate the return of a family member: In this case, a despondent widower’s spirits are lifted when his wife’s ghost visits and he raises her thobe over his house. He calls it thobe al-bisharah, the “thobe of the good omen.”
Fine thobes are also beginning to appear in museum collections. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has at least two, and the British Museum is home to the thobes of Dame Violet Dickson, wife of H.R.P. Dickson. In London, the nonprofit Mansoojat collection of Arabian women’s dress features several striking examples, including one given by the founder of Saudi Arabia, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al-Sa’ud, to Mary Eddy, wife of us Colonel William Eddy, who served as Minister Plenipotentiary to Saudi Arabia and translated between the King and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the historic meeting of the two on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal in 1945. Another fine, red thobe nashal in that collection was originally a gift to an American friend from Saudi Arabia’s Queen Effat, wife of King Faisal.
In Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts received several thobes from Dawn Nordblom, an American who lived in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province. In recognition of her gift, the museum’s Textile Society invited Arabian dress specialist Aisa Martinez to speak at the museum. Martinez is also a curator for the Zayed National Museum Project in Abu Dhabi.
Garments, she said, “are active participants in creating and fostering a sense of cultural identity … [and] a form of non-verbal communication,” one that “defines our roles in society” through “a language of personal adornment.” They show which group you belong to or which tribe you’re from, your wealth, status and social position.
Thobe customs are always changing, and popularity waxes and wanes. While weddings were once the principal occasion for a thobe, women today follow international fashion trends, or wear traditionally inspired gowns that mix and match old and new, Morocco with Pakistan and Paris. While in the past women often danced in their thobes at weddings, these days women and girls might don a thobe when performing folk dances at festivities such as national day celebrations.
Women in one Iraqi family recall how the custom of wearing thobes changed over four generations. Nawal Barbuti grew up in Iraq in the 1950s and ’60s, and she recalls that her grandmother’s generation wore the hashmi and the sayah dress under plain black abayas when they went out. In her mother’s generation, women favored Western dress styles, and the only time they wore a hashmi was to put on a black one for a funeral. In the late 1970s, there was hashmi revival, led by the government-run Iraqi Fashion House. Barbuti’s daughter Sara remembers wearing a red hashmi made by a family friend when she attended henna parties as a child in the 1980s.
One of the most active thobe-revival markets today, according to Saleh, is in Qatar. He flies the 280-kilometer roundtrip between Manama and Doha at least once a week. But now, instead of a suitcase full of samples, he packs maybe just one or two thobes, a pair of mobile phones and a laptop. More and more sales, he says, are coming through his posts on Instagram, and he takes orders over WhatsApp.
One of his Qatari customers, he says, recently ordered several dozen manthur-style thobes of tulle in a bouquet of colors for the guests at her daughter’s wedding, and she of course encouraged them to wear the thobes at the party.
Artist Hend al-Mansour recalls how growing up in al-Hasa Oasis in Saudi Arabia, she would watch her aunt make and embroider thobes on her sewing machine. Now an artist living in the us, al-Mansour maintains her family ties and says young women in al-Hasa have returned green and red thobes, after years of fashion neglect, to the henna-party tradition. Al-Mansour says she herself wore a green one at her own wedding in 2002.
It’s a key part of her identity, says al-Mansour, who says she always keeps at least one in her closet. She recalls that while studying at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design she once made a full-size self-portrait—dressed in her thobe.
Laila al-Bassam teaches a course in traditional Saudi women’s dress at Riyadh’s Princess Noura University in which her students cut and sew five traditional garments. A longtime collector of these garments and a fashion designer herself, al-Bassam wrote a book whose Arabic title translates to Traditional Inheritance of Women’s Clothing in Najd, about the women’s dress of her hometown of ‘Unayzah.
“People wear these gowns in Ramadan now. It is very important to attend evenings in Ramadan in this kind of dress—but new ones, not exactly the old ones,” she says. “People here are really interested in this kind of fashion. It looks nice and it gives the effect of the old gowns, with the cut lines and embroidery.
“For myself, sometimes I copy the old, but I use new colors since the traditional style was usually black. So I make a mutaffat [striped]-style thobe, but in all colors—red, fuscia, green—any colors I can find.”
Writing about late 20th-century traditions in the uae, Reem El-Mutwalli authored a beautifully illustrated, bilingual book, Sultani: Traditions Renewed. For her own part, she says that although she follows fashion in the uae, where she has lived for many years, she cherishes the thobes she inherited from her grandmother in Iraq, where she herself was born. Accordingly, she calls her own thobes hashmis, and she wears them for special occasions.
In the Emirates, she says, women still wear the thobe at festivities, religious holidays and wedding celebrations, and that “nowadays we have a tradition during Ramadan of people dressing up in Arab Islamic style … so they look for the thobe al-nashal and the new contemporary versions [from] new designers,” she notes.
“They interchange between the traditional, the new versions and the metamorphosed versions of those. It runs in circles. Every few years you start having a return to that style, then going away from it and then coming back.”
Rolling dough and baking, she makes the traditional sweet to share on Muslim holidays and also to send with pilgrims leaving her native Trinidad for the hajj in Makkah—with the provision they deliver some to her son, who lives there.
Maleeda is a sweetened dough ball made from a soft Indian griddle bread called paratha roti that first came to this Caribbean island in the late 19th century with Afghans, many of whom arrived as indentured servants, as well as with Muslims from India. Ever since then, Trinidadian maleeda has been adapted, like so many of its foods, to local tastes and ingredients such as coconut, cinnamon and clove, which are ubiquitous in Caribbean sweets—the latter two originally hailing from Southeast Asia. Although maleeda is to Muslims a special dessert for Muslims during Ramadan, the month of sunrise-to-sunset fasting, non-Muslim Trinidadians welcome it, too.
“It’s a usual thing for neighbors to share sweets and foods with each other,” says Ali, now retired and living near Point Lisas, an oil-industry town in the central part of the island. She is part of Trinidad’s Muslim community, which comprises mostly people of African, East Indian, Afghan and Syrian roots. “People will ask for and look forward to sweets like maleeda or sawine—the vermicelli pudding—that we normally make to bring to the mosque.”
The two-island country of Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost islands in the Caribbean chain, is a nation of many cultures. Just 13 kilometers off the coast of Venezuela, Trinidad was among the few places Christopher Columbus actually dropped anchor, and it quickly became a prize in the colonial battles for the New World. Initially colonized by Spain, it was taken by France and, for its longest period, England.
The colonial powers brought enslaved Africans here and, later, indentured Chinese and Indians of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim faiths, all to work on the sugar and cocoa plantations that built Trinidad’s first fortunes. (Today nearly half the island’s economy relies on oil and gas.) Cocoa laborers were recruited also from Venezuela, and, later, refugees from Syria and Lebanon found their way to these shores in an ongoing immigration that began in the late 19th century and continues today.
Second to Christianity, Islam is the longest-practiced religion in Trinidad. The first known and, later, most prominent Muslim was Yunas Mohammed Bath, an enslaved West African from the area between the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Literate in Arabic, he arrived in Trinidad around 1805, and he quickly became a leader among fellow enslaved Mandingo (Muslim) Africans.
A decade later Africans who were originally enslaved in Georgia and the Chesapeake region of the us arrived in Trinidad, where they were granted their liberty and some land along the eastern shore as payment for military service to Britain during the War of 1812.
Today eastern Trinidad remains a largely Muslim and mixed-race enclave, bolstered in the mid-19th century by indentured servants hailing from what is now Pakistan and northern India. As with all of the faiths, ethnicities and cultures that make up Trinidad today, it is food that most often provides opportunities for fellowship and understanding.
“Growing up, I remember that it was always the men who would make the paratha roti for big Islamic functions—weddings or holy days. They were the experts, so when anyone had a function—even if they were Hindu or Christian—the Muslim men were called upon as the best paratha roti-makers,” says Ali’s daughter Safiya, an attorney with Caricom, the Caribbean Community Secretariat, which promotes policy and development among 15 Caribbean nations. Safiya blogs about Trinidadian food on “Life-span of A Chennette,” and her mother tests recipes after reducing them from the large volumes used to prepare food for crowds at the mosque.
In the same vein, notes Safiya, whenever there was a large function in the village that required the help of women—perhaps for the ceremony beginning a Hindu wedding, or the celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights—all the ladies in town were called upon, and her mother, Nazira, especially was asked to join in making sweets.
“We didn’t participate in the fetes or dancing, but when there was a village ceremony, we participated in the cooking because we were part of the community,” says Safiya. She adds that she, her mother and sisters could help all the more easily at Hindu functions because they were vegetarian affairs, thus mooting any question about Islamic halal dietary codes concerning meat.
Many point to the presidency from 1987 to 1997 of Noor Hassanali, the country’s first Indian president and the first Muslim head of state in the Americas, as a watershed in the history of social relations among Muslims and non-Muslims in Trinidad. It was the efforts of his wife, First Lady Zalayhar Hassanali, often made through food, that perhaps provided the most tangible opportunities for cultural and culinary cross-pollination.
“When I became First Lady, I served East Indian, Chinese, Creole and Syrian foods at state dinners to demonstrate our nation’s diversity,” she says. “But one thing we never served was liquor or pork because we are Muslims.”
While there was at first some concern about how dignitaries both at home and from abroad would accept this, Hassanali says people respected the couple’s decision—including Great Britain’s Princess Anne, whom Hassanali recalls enjoying the First Lady’s freshly pressed juices from fruits grown on the presidential estate.
“Even though it was shocking to many for a head of state to create a restriction about things that are so integral to Western diplomatic etiquette and there were those who frowned on it, in the end people respected the Hassanalis’ decision,” says hotelier Gerard Ramsawak, who is also a founding member of a multicultural outreach association the works with the office of the president of Trinidad and Tobago.
As manager of Pax Hotel, a historic building on the grounds of Mt. St. Benedict, one of the island’s oldest monasteries, Ramsawak regularly attended state dinners that included diplomats, artists and business people throughout President and First Lady Hassanali’s tenure.
“Mrs. Hassanali’s secret was that she embraced the larger culture of Trinidad and Tobago—a culture that is a melting pot where we’ve learned to appreciate each other’s differences,” he says.
Today food continues to represent mutually influential exchanges among Muslim and non-Muslim Trinidadians. While in the past most non-Muslim Trinidadians enjoyed Muslim foods, largely thanks to the generosity of Muslim neighbors and friends, some foods have become such a common part of daily life they are readily available to all.
The sawine that is a must-have for Muslims at ‘Id al-Fitr has become so popular that major Trinidadian food manufacturing brands such as Chief and Sheik Lisha sell packaged, toasted vermicelli with premeasured spices so that anyone can make the dessert at home.
“Sawine is something we all like even though it’s an Islamic food,” says Ramsawak. “Chinese, Hindu, Christian—we all make it at home.”
The presence of halal meat shops and restaurants throughout the country, frequented by people of all faiths and ethnicities, are another example.
Sarina Nicole Bland is part of the island’s extremely small Jewish community. She, too, blogs about the diversity of the cuisine in her homeland. She says she appreciates the ubiquity of halal restaurants, ranging from Chinese to burgers, Indian, barbecue, Arab and more.
“I keep kosher, and the laws of halal are extremely similar,” says Bland. “It makes things a lot easier for me.” Among her favorite Muslim Trinidadian foods is “fat kurma,” another sweet dish that is often brought to mosques for Friday prayers. It is one of the many dishes that demonstrate the subtle difference between foods that are considered Muslim versus Hindu or simply Trinidadian. A crispy fried treat that is coated in sugar, the Muslim version of kurma is more like a tiny doughnut with a crisp crust.
“I’m not sure how or why the two versions came about, or why one became associated with Muslims or the other Hindu,” says Safiya. “But that could be said about a lot of our foods.”
Nazira says that paratha roti, which is the forebear to the overwhelmingly popular “buss up shut”—in which the paratha is torn or shredded and has become the default standard to eat with curries—was considered Muslim while dalpuri—in which the paratha is stuffed with ground lentils—was largely thought to be Hindu, and was once only made for special occasions. “Now both are eaten by everyone interchangeably,” she says.
Also widely popular is pelau, the Trinidadian version of biryani, a Persian rice dish brought to India by the Mughal emperors. It is an excellent example of the influence, adaptation and evolution of Muslim dishes within Trinidadian cuisine. The layered rice dish is made with meat that is “browned” in caramel syrup in the African style and seasoned with “green seasoning,” a local mixed herb paste, hot pepper and coconut milk.
Like the biryanis that are often served in mosques in India, Trinidadian pelau is an incredibly popular one-pot dish that is also often made in mosque kitchens, particularly after 'Id al-Adha (Feast of the Sacrifice), in which cows, sheep and sometimes goats are sacrificed and the meat cooked immediately, while fresh. At the same time, pelau made from chicken or beef is a pan-Trinidadian dish often made for large gatherings and, especially, Sunday lunch with the family.
Even as the cuisine of Muslim Trinidadians has crossed over into larger culture and also been influenced by the culture around it, culinary evolution continues. A new wave of “Muslim food” is, again, changing the way Trinidadians eat—mostly in the form of the shawarma stands, locally called gyro (jie-roh), that now line major boulevards in towns, from the capital of Port of Spain in the north all the way down to San Fernando, the large oil-and-gas city in the south and, seemingly, everywhere in between.
Almost exclusively the bailiwick of the newest Syrian refugee immigrants, these stands range from independent operators, like Hassan’s, Yousef’s and Original’s, all the way to franchises like Pita Pit and even Lawrence of Arabia. Gyros are rapidly overtaking “traditional” fast-foods like doubles, a curried chickpea sandwich and oyster shooters from mangrove oysters, as the go-to after-party food for the clubbing crowd.
“The people line up for gyros every night,” says Zuher Dukhen who with his brothers arrived in Trinidad within the last few years. At their takeout stand, named Sami’s Arabian, they make their meat daily, hand-forming it using traditional methods. “Mostly we serve chicken because that is okay for most everybody—Hindu or Muslim.”
While for now the fare of this new food community remains fairly true to its ethnic origins, if the history of this island is any indication of the future, then it will not be long until it, too, is adapted, assimilated and in turn influenced.
“It wasn’t easy to make pure Arabic foods when our grandfathers first came,” says Adam Abboud, a Syrian-Lebanese Trinidadian whose Christian ancestors arrived more than a century ago. “They made do using things like the local shado beni for cilantro and patchoi for spinach. We made shankleesh cheese using cow’s milk instead of sheep’s milk. Now, it’s our own Trinidadian thing, and it’s what we prefer.”
Shankleesh is a homemade cheese made from aging strained yogurt (labneh) that is then rolled in spices and herbs, most often the Lebanese thyme called za’atar. Abboud is the proprietor of Adam’s Bagels, an eatery that bakes Arab breads onsite and serves olives, olive oil, herbs and spices imported from Syria and Lebanon, as well as locally made shankleesh.
Safiya Ali agrees. “My mother’s father was a Syrian Muslim who came here in the 1940s, and my mom made plenty of kibbeh and falafel when I was growing up, but I remember having to travel to Port of Spain to get the ingredients she needed. They weren’t so common as they are now,” she says.
For Trinidadians, these cultural nuances are just part of what it means to be Trinidadian.
Nazira Ali recalls attending mosque school every evening as well as the village Sunday school while she was growing up—with children of all faiths.
“We still all identified with our own religion,” she says. “Whenever the lesson was about biblical stories—like Ibrahim or the story of Christmas—we’d share our version of what Islam says about it,” she explains. “It was just learning. We grew up together and respected each other, in practicing our faith and in sharing our food.”
“For some reason I don’t understand and never will, some impulse caused me to bend over and scratch the sandy surface of this windblown area with my finger,” he says. He struck something hard. When he brushed away the sand, he found nine intact ceramic pots, each about a handspan wide at its mouth. He took three of them back to his home. After some research, he estimated they could be as much as 4,000 years old. When he returned to the us a few years later, he took the pots with him.
That was before Saudi Arabia had well-established museums and antiquities-preservation institutions, before regulations controlled the export of antiquities. For Ackerman and many others, including many Saudi citizens, such pots were just souvenirs of a not-too-extraordinary day’s outing.
Others, however, took their amateur collecting more seriously. This led to the popularity of the term “pot-picking” that, beginning in the 1950s, described a largely recreational activity that lasted through the late ’70s, when Saudi Arabia began its concerted effort to preserve its national archeological heritage at home.
Beverly Swartz recalled this informal archeology as “an unequaled, heart-thumping thrill, no matter how many times we experienced it.” She and her husband, Carter, moved with their three children in 1958 to Dhahran, Aramco’s headquarters, where Carter helped guide management-training programs. On weekends and holidays, the family would join others to travel, explore, camp—and collect antiquities.
Swartz said that often their campsites were “littered with arrowheads and other Stone Age tools.” With her avid interest in archeology, she knew the significance of her family’s finds: The only problem was that there was no place to put them except in boxes and on shelves at home, organized by type and location.
Today, that’s no longer the case. Shortly after Saudi Arabia opened its National Museum in 2001 in Riyadh, it began formally to welcome antiquities home. In 2003 the country made preservation a goal of what is now the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (sctnh), headed by Prince Sultan ibn Salman ibn Abdulaziz. Since then, the sctnh has focused much on the return of archeological artifacts from the private collections of Saudis and former expatriates to make them available for study and museum display.
It is an effort that relies almost entirely on goodwill. Ali I. Al-Ghabban, vice president of the sctnh, points out that almost every one of what now totals more than 46,000 objects—some 16,000 from Saudis and 30,000 from expatriates—has been handed over voluntarily. For Swartz and others, the process was satisfying. “When we started our desert excursions and artifact collecting, the kingdom was not yet focused on discovering and preserving archeological sites,” she said in an interview before her death in 2013. “We not only enjoyed our finds, but felt we were saving them for eventual recognition and identification. Their rightful home is back in Saudi Arabia.”
In 1976 Saudi Arabia became signatory to the 1970 unesco Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, the first international legal framework for controlling traffic in cultural property. In the four decades since, repatriation of antiquities has become a global effort. Such repatriations “strengthen national sentiment [and] increase social cohesion,” says unesco spokesman Edouard Planche. “[They] also allow experts and tourists to study and to visit antiquities on the sites of origin,” while contributing to economic development through the tourism industry.
For example, the J. Paul Getty Museum in California has returned treasures to the Italian Ministry of Culture, while an exhibition in January at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo showed off about 200 antiquities from among some 500 that had been repatriated from the us, uk, Germany, Belgium and Australia.
“While the past belongs to all of us collectively, context is really key,” says Rachel Dewan, executive director of Saving Antiquities for All, a us-based nonprofit organization dedicated to thwarting smuggling and supporting antiquities repatriations. “The added meaning and significance of an object in its place of origin is powerful. Fortunately, many people around the world recognize this importance.”
One of them was Elinor Nichols of Bailey’s Island, Massachusetts. Indeed, her wish to repatriate what she lightly calls “a rather heavy shipment of rocks”—140 kilograms in all, it turned out—helped set in motion the ongoing artifact-repatriation campaign aimed at former expatriates. Prominent in her collection were limestone and basalt grinding stones and a meter-long stone block inscribed with Taymanitic script dating to the sixth century bce. By 2012 what became the Antiquities Homecoming Project had harvested some 14,000 items from 14 us donors, and more came from an additional 25 donors later. The objects range from arrowheads to stone blades and axe-heads, and from glass bracelet pieces to petroglyphs, coins, clay pots, shards and figurines.
In response to Nichols’s donation, Prince Sultan wrote to her personally. “As you know, preserving and exhibiting ancient treasures of the kingdom has become a major cultural effort” with several goals, he explained. “First, to increase tourism to these unique sightseeing attractions, and second, to enhance the education of Saudi Arabians about their heritage and history. Our efforts to discover and preserve the treasures of our history has hit a responsive note among Saudis, who are eager to learn more of their past.”
Indeed, Saudis have responded positively. In 2012, Al-Ghabban accepted return of a heritage piece dating to the early period of Islam from Daifallah Al-Ghofaili, a private museum owner from al-Rass, northwest of the kingdom’s capital. “I was prompted to hand over the antique in recognition of the top priority and concern given by [sctnh] authorities to preserve these treasures,” Al-Ghofaili told the newspaper Al-Eqtisadiah. “This move would contribute substantially to highlighting the kingdom’s heritage and its sublime position in the human civilization,” he added.
Similarly, the newspaper reported that Abdul Aziz bin Khaled Al-Sudairy donated 15 artifacts, including an inscribed marble-and-bronze piece from al-Ukhdud in the kingdom’s southwest that dates from between 600 and 300 bce. “No one except me, my children and those visiting us ever saw them,” he said, adding that he hoped his donation would enable more people to view them in museums.
In February 2012 Prince Sultan invited expatriate donors—many in their 70s and 80s, and most with Aramco connections—together with family members to join 80 Saudi donors in a ceremony of recognition held at the National Museum.
Addressing the expatriate donors, Prince Sultan said, “I’m very happy to see people and their children bringing back important treasures. We are experiencing the golden age of antiquities and heritage in Saudi Arabia.” The country is, he added, undertaking a national project to establish new, regionally focused museums. “You are not just giving back artifacts,” he said. “You are being part of a major heritage initiative.”
Princess Adela bint Abdullah, a daughter of late King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz and head of the National Museum’s consultation committee, met with the expatriate women and complimented them. Many of the returned objects “were acquired by people who appreciated, valued and preserved them,” she said. Voluntarily repatriating precious artifacts “shows a great appreciation for the history of our nation. I believe the gesture was a great one as after keeping them for a long time some would feel that those pieces were part of their lives.”
This struck a chord with donor Pat Oertley, who had donated a camel petroglyph that she had found on a pile of rubble under a cliff that was inscribed with “mostly animals and a few stick figures” at Wadi al-Faw in southwestern Saudi Arabia. “I’m very pleased to return the camel, but I will miss him,” she said.
Of the three pots Ackerman found while picnicking, he said simply, “They belong in Saudi Arabia. I’m pleased to have the opportunity to return them.”