Shifting towards the Arabian Peninsula: An Interview with William Granara

April 17, 2015

On April 21, 2015, Professor David Commins delivered the inaugural CMES Lecture on Arabian Peninsula Studies. In this interview CMES Director William Granara discusses this new lecture series.

Why is Arabian Peninsula Studies important now?
Over the last twenty years the Arabian Peninsula has emerged in both geopolitical and academic importance. One could go back further and say this emergence began in 1973 with the Arab oil embargo, but since 1991 when Saddam invaded Kuwait, and of course since 9/11 in 2001, the region has become more political, and the idea of the Arabian Peninsula has become more important to the study of the Middle East. We have a good history of anthropology in Yemen, but apart from that there has been a gap in the way that academia teaches about this part of the world. When I was a student twenty or thirty years ago, the Arabian Peninsula was essentially a footnote, apart from some interest in Mecca and Medina for Islamic Studies. Traditionally Middle Eastern Studies has focused on the areas of greater Syria, with special interest in the Arab/Israeli conflict, and on Egypt. (Of course there were people who focused on Turkey, Israel, and Iran, but those three parts of the Middle East have their own well-developed language and discrete area studies.)

For a long time Middle Eastern Studies has been thought of as centering around the Mediterranean and looking up towards Europe. Both during the colonial and post-colonial periods, the field assumed a long historical connection to western Europe. More recently however there has been a major shift in Middle Eastern Studies, from a Mediterranean-centered or Mediterranean-looking perspective, towards the Persian Gulf. We also see India and China becoming increasingly larger players in the region. So what I’m trying to do at CMES is to expand our focus on the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, which today includes Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Kuwait. In response to these geopolitical shifts I mentioned, I’d like to start building up a multidisciplinary program focused on this area of the world, not to replace, but to broaden the Middle East Studies curriculum at Harvard University, and to encourage and support faculty in including the study of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula in their courses.

How does the new lecture series fit into this effort?
The lecture series is the first small step in that direction, made possible by an alumni gift, which we'll use to bring scholars to CMES once per semester to give lectures both to the Harvard community and to the general public. David Commins, Professor of History at Dickinson College, will deliver the inaugural lecture next week. Professor Commins started in “canonical” Middle East Studies and has since moved to work on the Arabian peninsula. His work deals with Wahhabism, which has a very long history going back to the 1700s and extending all the way to the present, where it’s still very relevant, and with the evolution of state and statehood in the Arabian Peninsula.

We’re also trying to make the series cover as many of the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences as possible. I wanted to begin with a historian—for the next lecture in the fall, an anthropologist would be in order, as the anthropologists have contributed most to Arabian Peninsula Studies so far. In the future I would also like to bring in a legal scholar, and someone who works on literature.

You've organized a few recent projects focusing on Arabian Peninsula literature recently, right?
Yes, another factor that has drawn my attention to the Arabian Peninsula is that over the last twenty years, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the production of the Arabic novel in the Arabian Peninsula. Up until a couple of decades ago there were just a handful of novels and short stories that had been produced in the region in the prior 30 or 40 years. Recently however there has been a dramatic surge in the production of fiction, particularly in Saudi Arabia, and it’s very exciting. Our effort to bring Saudi writer and scholar Moneera Al-Ghadeer here as the Shawwaf Visiting Professor last fall was another part of my project to try to expand the Arabian Peninsula’s presence in the curriculum and to draw attention to its importance. We also recently invited Mai Al-Nakib, a short story writer from Kuwait, to give a talk for the CMES Director's series. 

Professor Malika Zeghal and I organized a conference at Radcliffe last fall that brought Professor Al-Ghadeer and Umayma Khamis, a prominent novelist and public intellectual in Saudi Arabia, together with faculty from Harvard. The conference drew attention to what is being produced in contemporary Saudi Arabia in terms of literature as well as cultural history and scholarship, and to how Saudi women are becoming more and more important as public figures—as academics, as journalists, as novelists, and as writers. I think it helped us to consider how we can become better teachers of Middle East Studies, particularly how we can start to add to our curriculum, to expand beyond the more traditional focuses on Egypt and Lebanon and Syria, the Arab-Israeli conflict, to include the Arabian Peninsula—and not just as a producer of oil, but as a place of cultural production as well, home to novelists, short story writers, literary critics, and anthropologists.

More broadly, what are your hopes for a larger program of Arabian Peninsula Studies?
A program like this should be multi-targeted, multi-purposed, engaging undergraduates and graduates and as many faculty as we can, not only from FAS but also from other schools on campus. I’d like to build a program that would encourage all of our students from undergraduates to master’s and doctoral students to consider going to the Arabian Peninsula to conduct field work for their theses, and I would like to be able to fund that travel. (Interestingly many of our Middle East Studies graduates, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, are now settled in the Arabian Peninsula, so Harvard has a fairly good group of alumni there.) I’m also interested in faculty exchanges: offering short-term grants so that our faculty could go to the region, and inviting eminent scholars from the Arabian Peninsula to come and give lectures here at Harvard and meet with students. I’m also hoping that we can create a winter session course for undergraduates to go to this part of the world for a short term familiarization trip.

Needless to say we need to raise more money to implement these different programs, so that will be our next task.