The Creative Kingdom

2.1 “A good Muslim has to think outside the box”: Islam and the Saudi creative economy

In October 2017, plans for NEOM were unveiled, a futuristic new city situated next to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba, with an economy based, on the one hand, on tourism, leisure and entertainment and, on the other hand, on the future-oriented sectors of bio- and nanotechnology as well as artificial intelligence.^[13] The project has been promoted by the crown prince as a “civilizational leap for humanity”. While promoting the idea of the new city, Prince Mohammed bin Salman vowed to bring back “moderate Islam” (Saudigazette 2017) and transform the kingdom through technology, knowledge, and reforms focusing on the influence of Islamic authorities in the country. Landmark rulings in this context were the decision to end bans for women on obtaining driving licenses or entering sport stadiums, new guidelines to curtail the powers of the Islamic police (muṭawwiʿūn), and to establish a new authority to monitor uses of the Hadith. Saudi Arabia is often described as a theocratic state. Alongside tribal allegiance, the royal family has for decades relied on Wahhabi interpretations of Islam to legitimize their rule and to mold a distinct Saudi national identity. While the relationship between the ruling family and Wahhabi clerics, often described as symbiotic, has for decades been criticized by economic reformers, since the formulation of Saudi Vision 2030, the status quo between Islamic authorities and the state has been questioned also by state actors. In a mission statement to the reform program, the reforms are legitimized in an Islamic way:

“Islam and its teachings are our way of life. They are the basis of all our laws, decisions, actions and goals. Following Islam’s guidance on the values of hard work, dedication, and excellence, Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, said: ‘That Allah loves us to master our work’. Therefore, the principles of Islam will be the driving force for us to realize our Vision. The values of moderation, tolerance, excellence, discipline, equity, and transparency will be the bedrock of our success.”^[14]

For my research, I conducted twelve qualitative research interviews with actors involved in the field of art and design in Saudi Arabia during art and design events in the UAE, Kuwait and London: entrepreneurs from the field of cultural or creative industries, artists, designers, and software developers, all Saudi citizens who grew up and live in Saudi Arabia and are younger than 35.^[15] In many interviews, economic reform and the changes needed in the educational sector and in the leisure, service and creative industries are considered of highest importance. One of the interviewees, a self-described high-ranking advisor to the General Authority of Culture, sees the role of the Islamic clerics not only as damaging to the future of the nation, but also to Islam. In his eyes,

“Islam was once a power of progress, of science, of creativity. Go to any Museum of Islamic Art and you see what design thinking is all about. The Islamic world brought the brightest minds together, created new fashion or food trends. These guys were bad-ass. They brought Islam to the jungle and to the highest mountains. And they never stopped inventing, going forward. We have to convince people that Islam has answers for the challenges of the future. The Islamic authorities in Riyadh don’t understand that Islam allows change. Islam is about pushing you to go further, not limiting you. We’re too busy building mosque after mosque in our neighborhoods. I want us to build a mosque on Mars in 20 years.”^[16]

Another interviewee, a designer involved in “improving the lives of people in vulnerable situations” through “human-centered problem solving and design thinking”, stressed that

“We people in the Middle East live on the remains of cultures that thought they would exist forever. Babel, Ninive, the Persians, the Romans, they all thought they would be here until the end of time. And if we are not careful, all our five-star hotels will also be ruins in the desert. When Muhammad came, he did something completely new. He was thinking outside the box. He surprised everybody and changed the game. This is what we have to learn from Muhammad. We have to stop being self-gratulatory. A good Muslim has to think outside the box. And art is teaching us just that.”

A young female expert writing for the magazine Entrepreneur Middle East and working as an advisor to the Saudi General Entertainment Authority^[17], whom I had the chance to interview during Dubai Design Week 2016, emphasized how much the academic study of Islam has contributed to her changed views on the role of Islam in Saudi society:

“You grow up with these clear-cut ideas what Islam is and what Islam isn’t. But when you dig deeper and do your research, you realize there’s a myriad ways to be a good Muslim. I just read Shahab Ahmed’s What is Islam. He makes it clear that Islam has been adapted to so many cultures and ways of life. It’s the most diverse religion of the planet. And we have to celebrate that. Once our houses invited wine-drinking poets and African musicians and Buddhist monks and gay dancers. Islam created so much beauty – which contributed to the spread of our religion. Nowadays, people leave Saudi whenever they can. To enjoy life they’re off to Dubai or London or Thailand. How can we convince people of the beauty of Islam, when we don’t allow beauty in Islam anymore?”

A female artist teaching pottery classes for girls under the age of twelve stressed that creativity is one of the most important elements of Islam.

“Islam is based on creative thinking. Look at the concept of ijtihad – you have to use your mind, you have to be ready to answer challenges, to react to the problems of a changing world. So to teach our kids art and creativity, to keep our minds dynamic is a religious duty.”

Interviewing a young volunteer working in the field of art education, he explained to me that:

“Allah gave us oil at the moment when we were about to be wiped out from history. It’s a miracle we never really appreciated and used in our favor. With the new crown prince there is a chance to make Saudi a powerhouse in science and the arts. Our people are young and smart. We just have to stop teaching them fear and passivity and teach them to open their minds. His highness has already started to fight the corrupt parts in the ruling classes – the next stop is to fight corruption in the name of Islam.”

As mentioned in my interviews, cases such as Ashraf Fayadh’s motivate many of the interviewees to navigate very carefully between the permissible and the non-permissible in order to not be seen as blasphemous. The interviews show that there is not only a growing dissatisfaction with the role of the Islamic authorities in the country, but a sense that the actions of the Ulama are misusing Islam and endangering the future of the country. In his essay “Putting Islam out of work“, researcher Ahmed Dailami (2018) stresses:

“The regular denunciation of misused or misplaced religion is interesting in this context not because of its common-sense nature – which, incidentally, provides it with great currency and popular purchase – but because it implies that religion has an appropriate place in the social and political order, however ambiguously. The power and influence of Islam, so the argument goes, is not to be cynically harnessed to unfitting ends. If such a consensus is to be taken seriously, it stands in direct contrast to one of the pillars of political Islamism at its peak 20 years ago: that Islam cannot be bound; that Islam is an entire ‘way of life,’ a wholesale alternative to secular social and political orders. In essence, religion’s boundaries in Arab political life are contracting, even when those boundaries remain vague.”

In almost all^[18] of my interviews, the hopes are pinned to the “rational”, “business-minded” crown prince to distance his rule from the “outlandishly overstretched ambitions of the Ulama“, as one interviewee put it. Many mention the system of the rulers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi as a model for the kingdom, because decision-making there is seen as more balanced and based on different fields of expertise: “International economic experts, Islamic authorities, health professionals, artists, scholars on family life and happiness, all have their say in decision-making. There is not one voice dominating the other, all have the ear of the ruler”, elaborated a financial advisor from Riyadh. Especially the emirate of Dubai just launched not only an „Islamic Creative Economy“ competition, but also released a comprehensive report on the importance of the Islamic Culture and Art Economy for the future development of the Emirate.^[19]

Ahmed Dailami describes these “new strains of conservative yet secular political rhetoric” as “monarchist” and sees them as a reaction to sectarian violence and the politization of Islam. But criticizing the power of the Ulama does not lead to a request for a more democratic or secular political order. As the reactions of pro-Saudi news outlets and social media to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi have shown, the fact that he had ties to the Muslim Brotherhood is used to legitimize his murder, as he was “instrumentalizing Islam to question our ruler”, as one interviewee put it. While the Ulama is expected by many citizens to safeguard Islam, monitor public morality, and have the last say in fields such as art and entertainment, my interviews demonstrate that at least young creative entrepreneurs and artistic practitioners instead expect the ruler to monitor the boundaries between Islamic authorities and the fields of art, entertainment and the creative industries – and to have the final say on what’s morally acceptable or not – even more so as these fields become producers of economically beneficial forms of Islamic knowledge, which the Islamic authorities cannot provide.

2.2 A new picture of Saudi Arabia to the world: artists as national ambassadors

Art is not only a resource for the creative industries and a recreational good in the post-oil leisure economies. It also offers “territorial marketing by spreading a flattering image” (Dumortier 2014, 172) of a city or nation. In her monograph Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity, Melissa Aronczyk (2013) analyzes how governments across the globe since the nineties have conceptualized nationalism in new ways and have reoriented their attention from classical forms of power towards cultural politics (Aronczyk 2013, 11). The future of the nation rests on finding a lucrative role in the globally integrated economic system. In a world “where borders and boundaries appear increasingly obsolete”(Aronczyk 2013, 3)policy-makers have turned to experts in branding and public relations to make their nation matter, by modeling a favorable and distinctive national image for an international public of investors, tourists, and high-skilled migrants, and fostering “pride and patriotism within the nation’s borders” (Aronczyk 2013, 16). Amid global flows of late modernity, national branding offers young and small nations in particular a technique to strengthen national visibility and legitimacy(Aronczyk 2013, 3). It also delivers stories about how to be a national citizen in a globalized world, “in a vernacular that is easily understood by most segments of society” (Aronczyk 2013, 176). In her book Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf, Miriam Cooke (2014) argues that national governments in the Gulf States invented a new form of cultural brand – “the tribal modern,“ which combines aspects of global contemporary culture with elements of imagined tribal traditions. Cultural institutions, such as the museums in smaller Gulf States, serve to generate national cohesion and popularize state-led narratives – through use of identarian labels such as “Arab”, “Saudi,“ “Qatari” (Ghanem 2011), or “Islamic”, which are all applied also to the field of contemporary art.^[20] In the preface of the coffee-table book Contemporary Kingdom, published in 2014 in cooperation with the Saudi Art Council to introduce the work of Saudi artists, galleries, foundations, and patrons to the global art public, Princess Jawaher bint Majed Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud writes:

“[...] I have always had faith that the creative spirit in Saudi-Arabia is alive, and even if muted by circumstance, was striving hard to be heard. The challenges we faced do not stem from any deficit in the creative imagination; our people have always flourished artistically. For millennia, Arabia has had a vibrant culture deeply influenced by language and religion. [...]

I believe that all we have experienced as a nation has strengthened us, adding the complexity needed to transform our personal aesthetic into a universal voice which belongs on the world’s stage” (Bint Majed bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud 2014, 6–7).

Her statement emphasizes that artists are seen as expressing more than their individual creative imagination – they represent the creative energy of the nation. As part of the National Transformation Program (NTP)^[21], the Saudi culture and information minister Adel Al-Turaifi wants to use arts proactively “to counter negative stereotypes of the kingdom” (The National 2016) and to offer a “new picture of Saudi Arabia to the world”, as the media have reported (The Express Tribune 2016). Exhibitions of contemporary Saudi art at the British Museum, the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, or at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (Bregman 2016) were all sponsored by influential private, royal, and state actors. But acts of censorship, especially human rights violations, such as in the case of Ashraf Fayadh, have put the whole endeavor into question. The influence of Islamic authorities, government crackdowns on human rights, and Islamic censorship in the art sector are seen by many not only as limiting the creativity of the nation’s youth, but are also considered bad for business and a threat to the kingdom’s economic transformation. In an interview I conducted via Skype with a Saudi female artist on the government’s recent crackdown of feminist activists, she stressed that the backlash would “cost the country billions. We’re playing into the hands of our enemies. All the bright people are leaving the country, which we just no longer can afford. Censorship and human rights abuses are an act of treason on the future of our youth.”

A gallery owner and curator involved in educational programs with students and pupils identifies the main problem as the fact that:

“Oil has made us lazy. Never have Arabs contributed so little to the global economy as today. Our voices are not heard, our faces not seen, our stories not told. We once had the world’s best artists, architects and craftsmen. We influenced every culture from Europe to China. And now? We’re back in the time of unbelief (Jāhilīyah). We don’t believe in god because we don’t believe in ourselves. We are wasting our talent and are crushing our youth.”

“Saudi Arabia is now at the crossroads. On the one hand, many people are fascinated with the past and hope to find answers for the future in our heritage. The others see the answers in global capitalism and hyper-consumption. What this country needs now more than ever is a youth rooted in our heritage, but with an open mind to question that heritage, and the creativity to adapt our heritage for the 21st century”, a person involved in the 21, 39 program in Jeddah pointed out. “If the Ulama are safeguarding our heritage, then they safeguard the wrong part of our heritage. Hard work, openness to change, creative thinking and making money has always been part of Islam.”

The interviews I conducted highlight the role these artists and creative entrepreneurs see for themselves in a changing Saudi Arabia. They question the country’s Islamic authorities and the status quo between the Ulama and the state not as secular, rebellious figures but, as one interviewee described, “deeply religious Saudi citizens”. As my interviews presented in this article have shown, all interviewees supported their claims for more artistic freedom and less Islamic censorship not only with economic arguments, but substantiated their views by relating to Islamic scholarship or history. Several interviewees framed the country’s current economic situation as un-Islamic, and stressed that the idea of artistic Islamic knowledge production is not against Islam, but part of Islamic heritage. By referring to Islamic narratives and material culture to give legitimacy to their concerns, they not only request a lessening of the Ulama’s influence in the fields of creative industries, entertainment and arts, in addition they also formulate Islam-based forms of futurism, challenging Islamic authorities in a broader sense.

2.3 Does art steal away time from prayer?

As already mentioned, voices demanding civil and minority rights have always existed in Saudi Arabia. But while in the past these voices were always marginalized, the pressures of economic reform initiated by the government are now leading to a shift in the power-relations between different social fields and to a valorization of formerly negligible forms of social capital. Nothing exemplifies this rise of artists more than the career of Ahmed Mater, one of the most influential Saudi artists. In November 2017, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman launched the Misk Art Institute, a new institution set to “become Saudi Arabia’s leading platform for grassroots cultural production, diplomacy and exchange” (Rasooldeen 2017). The Crown Prince himself appointed Mater as head of the new initiative. Born in 1979 and raised in Rijal Alma (Stapleton 2010b), Mater had his first contact with artistic practices through his mother. Herself a calligrapher and painter of traditional houses, she introduced him to different local and Islamic art practices, which she saw as “a way to preserve his culture, his heritage and his religion” (Stapleton 2010 b, 19). The family’s move from Rijal Alma to the modern provincial capital Abha brought Mater to question the values of his upbringing – a starting point for his critical reflection on art and society in Saudi Arabia. At the age of 19, he enrolled as a medical student at the Medical College of Abha. While pursuing his studies, he also started to work in a studio in Al-Meftaha Arts Village, which was under the patronage of Prince Khalid Al-Faisal (Stapleton 2010 b, 20). The physical space of the art village and a collaborative spirit between its artists helped him develop his own artistic voice, drawing on his tribal Aseeri identity, his scientific training and Islam. His “double life” as a doctor and an artist pushed him “to explore humanity, in an era of religious, political and cultural turmoil” (Stapleton 2010 a, 27). Together with Abdulnasser Gharem and the now-imprisoned Ashraf Fayadh he also founded the artist group Shatta, whose first show was a major success – and a scandal at the same time. Mater works in a broad range of mediums, from photography and calligraphy to video, installations and performances, through all of which he explores the shifts in Islam and transformations of Saudi society during his lifetime. In an essay for ArtAsiaPacific, he elaborates:

“The country, and Islam as a whole, is now punctured with factions and sub-factions. Even if you are close to the subject, it is hard to follow. The main thing to bear in mind is that each of these strands is founded on a human interpretation of the Holy Qu’ran. There are endless possibilities for interpretation of this book, and each is subject to inconsistencies and subjectivities because, as humans, we bring our own experiences to the reading. There is also so much potential for deviation from the origins of Islam within this complex structure, inevitably leading to resentment and enmity between factions and sects, which in turn generate unrest and a landscape of misshapen identities within which I, and my contemporaries, create our work.” (Mater 2015)

Mater explores the ambivalent role of Islamic thinking, which dominates Saudi education. Mosques are still the country’s main educational institutions, sheikhs, imams and muftis the “foremost teachers” (Mater 2015) of the country’s youth, and the Friday prayer the most highly valued educational program. While he stresses the importance of a “homegrown education system” in opposition to the “imported” knowledge economies of the other Gulf States, he observes a lack of a “neutral” educational system that focuses on individual development, and is neither shaped by economic nor religious agendas. Art education in particular could offer such a third space:

“Although many in Saudi regard art education as a luxury, I see it as a necessity. Learning to create and appreciate conceptual, collective, social and visual representation, interpretation and understanding may be more important than ever to the development of the next generation. Art also has the potential to inform all areas of society. Feeding into every profession and cutting across racial, cultural, social, educational and economic barriers, it can foster true understanding, open thought where fear has no place and, as a result, promote a culture of awareness and acceptance.” (Mater 2015)

Mater’s comments correspond to a narrative which German cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz (2014) analyzed in his book Die Erfindung der Kreativität – that is, the emergence of creativity as a central dogma of global late capitalism, from the field of “creative industries” and the “experience economy”, through ideals of “affective labour” and the “entrepreneurial self” to the rise of “creative cities”. Reckwitz explores the normalization of creativity in post-Fordist economic imaginaries “as a generally desirable goal for everyone and in every area”. In the process of the normalization of creativity, the artist becomes not only a role model for the creative economy but for society as a whole. Through the new Saudi creative industries and influential actors such as Ahmed Mater, the global narrative around art and creativity gets naturalized for a Saudi setting. Openly criticizing the view of Wahhabi clerics who judge art as haram, as “something that steals your time away from prayer”, Mater sees art not only as a reflexive tool for innovation and progress, but also as an inherent part of Islamic history and heritage. A landmark exhibition organized by Edge of Arabia in the Saudi city of Jeddah in 2012 typifies the approach of Saudi artists such as Mater in discussing pressing social issues by referring to and referencing Islamic narratives and visuals. Called “We Need to Talk”, the exhibition – which was pre-censored and approved by Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture and Information – featured more than 40 works of 22 artists, including 10 women.^[22]

One of the exhibition’s most discussed works was Esmi – My Name by female artist Manal Al-Dowayan (2012). The installation, comprised of giant Islamic prayer beads, was the result of a series of workshops and ventures of connection with women via Facebook. Starting out with the slogan “Do you want to be an object? If not, then teach your children to say your name”, Al-Dowayan gave 150 women the possibility to write their full names on large beads made of maple wood. These beads were later threaded together to become room-filling prayer beads – by female Bedouin artisans specialized in these techniques. Referring to the patriarchal male tradition in Saudi Arabia of not mentioning female relatives’ names, and in this way erasing them socially, Al-Dowayan not only visually connects the female names with the names of god, whom the prayer beads are traditionally reserved for, she also relates her artistic practice to a Hadith, in which Muhammad mentions the name of his wife. Another art work, The Stamp (Inshallah) by Abdulnasser Gharem (2012), criticizes the use of the phrase referenced in the title, which means “god willing” in Arabic, which he asserts leads to a delegation of responsibility from the individual. Above this central phrase in English and Arabic, the artist placed the demand “Have a bit of commitment” – criticizing a lack of motivation and willingness to take responsibility in Saudi society. Despite the fact that the artistic field has long been controlled and censored by the Islamic field (and that it partly still is), an exhibition such as We Need to Talk shows the growing confidence of Saudi artists not only to push back against religious censorship, but to intervene directly in the field of Islam by questioning Islamic mores and authorities themselves from an Islamic perspective.

Ahmed Mater’s artistic examination of the Hajj exemplifies these strategies further. Fascinated by the physical attraction, the “almost magnetic pull” his grandfathers described when approaching the Kaaba, one of his first artistic endeavors was an installation and series of photos that took their stories literally: using two perfectly black magnetic and iron shavings, he recreated the scene of pilgrims being drawn to the Kaaba.^[23] The work was later part of the British Museum’s much-discussed exhibition Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, which deliberately blurred the line between the educational and Islam by designing the exhibition as a “spiritual” experience^[24]. While some early works focus on the emotional quality of the Hajj, Mater’s on-going project Desert of Pharan opens up a much more critical conversation about the contemporary practice of Hajj. The project documents the rapid change of a city “bristling under the weight of its own dramatic symbolism” (Mater 2016 c, 576) in an age of mass pilgrimage. While Mecca has more than a million inhabitants, the Saudi government – with the agreement of the Islamic establishment, as Mater stresses – transforms the old cosmopolitan city with its diverse cultural and Islamic heritage into a global city full of immigrants and businessmen, an expression of a form of capitalism that Mater sees as opportunistic. Ninety-five percent of the city’s historic architecture has been demolished. Since 2008, after his first pilgrimage to Mecca since his childhood, Mater has been engaged in a decade-long research and documentary project exploring the mental, physical and spiritual impact these transformations have for the Muslim Ummah. For Mater, the transformation of Mecca not only affects architecture and heritage, but also the “spiritual health of the Muslim community” (Mater 2016 c, 577). Protecting Mecca and its heritage is a duty in Islam, connected to the Qur’an (Angawi 2016, 592–93). As a doctor and artist, Mater describes his practice of photography as a form of X-ray: it can be used as a ‘prognosis’ of the condition of a city or society. In the publication Desert of Pharan he makes reference to a Hadith: when the people around Mecca start building skyscrapers, that would be a sign of the end of times – a comment which transforms the project from a cultural commentary to an artistic vision with eschatological dimensions (Mater 2016 b, 123). In an exhibition of the project as part of Sharjah Biennial 11, Mater laments not only the destruction of public space but also the commodification of Islam’s most important mosque. Being near the Kaaba is now a matter of money: a hotel room with a view of the Kaaba can cost up to 3,000 USD a night. Furthermore, the furnishing of the hotel rooms can be seen as blasphemous, as the chairs in the room are not turned towards the window with a view overlooking the Kaaba but instead to the onlooker – if a person would use the chair shown in the photo, he or she would turn his or her back to the sanctuary (Mater 2011–2013). How can the magnetism of the city, explored in his earlier art, the “intimate ritual,” survive “against the backdrop of brutal development driven by a late capitalistic machine”? Can the “precious core tenets of Islam” compete with the new world of luxury and mass consumption on offer right next to the Kaaba (Mater 2016 a, 207)? While many Western art critics focus on the project as a commentary on globalization, neoliberal capitalism or the destruction of heritage – all issues Desert of Pharan explores –, it is important to take into account that his critique and art practice is Islamically motivated: by openly and directly criticizing the Islamo-industrial complex that has controlled Saudi Arabia during the oil boom – symbolized by the combined Islamic purification and ruthless modernization of Islam’s holiest city – Mater takes on the role of the Islamic critic himself, carving out a new role for artists in the country and putting the relations between the fields of Islam and art upside down: Mater is neither the victim of Islamic censorship nor a secular critic of Islam, but an Islamic critic himself.

Another part of the project called Labors of Faith looks into the exploitation of Muslim migrant workers and their religious sentiments through Saudi construction companies. Mater denounces the living conditions and wages of these workers, “attracted by the promise not only of work but also the unique, deep honor of working and living in Islam’s holiest city”, as shameful, a sharp contrast to the “sanctified site of supreme religious experience” (Mater 2016 d, 166 f.). Ahmed Mater himself describes the project Desert of Pharan as “more than art,” as a “prayer for Mecca” (Mater 2016 c, 580), through the thousands of photographs he took during his years mapping the seismic shifts in Saudi society and their effect on individual Muslim piety. His work experiments with modes of political, social, economic, and Islamic critique, reimagining forms of social engagement. This does not imply that the boundaries between Islam, art, and politics are completely blurred. Anthony Downey rightly observes:

“For art to maintain its critical powers in relation to politics, it must, somehow paradoxically, adopt a radical position within society and yet refrain from using the often reductive terms of political rhetoric. [...] Although artists often utilize the principles of activism, a clear distinction between art and activism nevertheless remains, inasmuch as the former is not always accompanied by any clear intent or indeed ambition to bring about change.” (Downey 2014, 14)

In the same way, art in the neoliberal world resists the complete integration into the post-Fordist accumulation regime; it equally has to refuse a mechanistic subsumption to the political and Islamic. Both enable it to emerge as a crucial practice of critique through which “horizons of possibility for civic imaginations” can emerge. In an interview, Ahmed Mater stresses that instead of “making political art, or art about science or religion, it’s important to include everything that surrounds you and not to construct mental partitions in your head” (Hemming 2008).