Abstract

Over the past ten years, Saudi Arabia has undergone a major transformation from a religiously very conservative oil-producing desert state to a country competing with the Gulf emirates in building spectacular cities, organising spectacular events and aiming at becoming the major Arab power. The lecture traces these changes, embedding them in a comparative perspective to earlier modernisation initiatives in order to assess whether the current changes constitute a radical departure from the country's recent past.
 

Bio

Ulrike Freitag is a historian of the modern Middle East with a special interest in the urban and cultural history of the Arabian Peninsula in a translocal perspective. Having studied in Bonn, Freiburg and Damascus, and started her academic trajectory at the German Open University, before moving to the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (1993-2002).
 

Freitag’s earlier work was concerned with Syria, resulting in her PhD thesis on Syrian historiography in the 20^th century (Geschichtsschreibung in Syrien 1920-1990, Hamburg 1991. Her next work concerned translocal connections between the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean rim, resulting in the volume Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut (Leiden 2003).
 

Since 2002, Freitag is director of Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and professor at Freie Universität Berlin (since 2002). She has worked on urban history, resulting in the edited volumes Urban Governance Under the Ottomans. Between cosmopolitanism and conflict, SOAS/Routledge Studies on the Middle East, (with Nora Lafi, Routledge 2014), Urban Violence in the Middle East. Changing Cityscapes in the Transition from Empire to Nation State, (with Nelida Fuccaro, Claudia Ghrawi, Nora Lafi, Berghahn 2015) and her monograph A History of Jeddah. The Gate to Mecca in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (CUP 2020).
 

Among her  recent publications are “Of Jewels, Eyeglasses, and Books: Muḥibb al-Dīn al-Khaṭīb as Booktrader and Publisher in the Early 1920s”, in Katja Föllmer, Lisa Maria Franke, Ramzi Ben Amara, Rethinking the anthropology of Islam”, De Gruyter 2024, pp. 257-272; “Die Arabische Halbinsel, der Jemen. Die Wandlung charismatischer Herrschaft zu Staaten im imperialen Kontext“, in Andreas Kaplony (ed.), Geschichte der Arabischen Welt, C.H. Beck 2024, 489-507; and  Spaces of Participation. Dynamics of Social and Political Change in the Arab World (ed. with Randa Aboubakr, Sarah Jurkiewicz, Hicham Ait-Mansour, AUC Press 2021).

   

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