most no roads so that travel to many
regions amounted to expeditions;
today superhighways crisscross the
country. Then its few telephones were
virtually inoperative even across town
in the capital; today, one can dial direct
from even the most remote sites to any
other “modern” center in the world
more easily than in most of Europe
and much of America. Then, there was
virtually no public entertainment and
little education other than rudimentary
religious schools; today, television
reaches into every house and virtually
every family has dozens, many have
thousands, of video tapes from Japan,
Europe and America, while free education
up to and including the universities
of Europe and America is the
citizen’s right. In 1950 even minor ailments
required treatment abroad, but
today huge medical complexes tower
over all the cities. In the avalanche of
the new, much of the old has simply
vanished. The desert today is truly
deserted as the Bedouin have sought
the cities’ bright lights. Walled villages
have been submerged beneath concrete,
glass and asphalt. It is easier, of
course, to document the passing of the
old than to discern the pattern of the
new. The Saudis have had little time
for or interest in nostalgia; for them
the past often means pain, privation
and weakness.”11
The move from nomadic to urbanite
is irreversible because few will contemplate
returning from an air-conditioned
villa to a camel-haired tent in
the blazing heat of the desert. Today,
83% of the population is in the most
populous cities of Riyadh, Jeddah,
followed by Makka, and then Madina
Munawwara, an unprecedented
change in the history of the Peninsula
that is referred to as “The New Arab
Social Order” by at least one leading
sociologist.12 The oil boom created
massive internal migrations to the
cities, converted villages into towns,
while founding many new towns with a
sizable population in previously rural
areas. As stated in the U.N. website for
urban development, “While growth in
the largest cities has been very significant,
it is not confined to them only:
smaller cities outside Riyadh and other
major urban concentrations have also
witnessed similar growth. The number
of cities in Saudi Arabia increased
from 58 in 1936 to 258 in 2004 and
lately to 285 in 2015, distributed over
13 regions and 118 governorates.13 The
pace of urbanization has accelerated
over the past 20 years and is expected
to reach up to 93 % by 2030, which has
boosted the demand for massive construction
projects to meet the needs of
a burgeoning urban population.
A typical example of this is the mega
expansion of the Haram in Makka
and the Clock Tower overlooking the
Masjid Haram itself. The only significant
difference is that the construction
projects in the Holy City are designed
to meet the needs of the global population,
while the cosmopolitan Jeddah
and Riyadh are expanding upward
and outward due to mostly domestic
population. As stated in the Middle
East Journal, “Petrodollars enabled the
authorities to undertake prestigious
building projects, attract the best architects
and use the most expensive
building materials.”12
The change was rapid and rather disastrous
for an ancient and insular
society that had been hardened and
sheltered by the desert against inflictions
on their ancestral ways. The saying
“There are decades where nothing
happens, and there are weeks where
decades happen” best encapsulates
the perishing of the conservative, traditional
society that was impervious
to any change over the centuries, but
was now undergoing rapid and radical
ones by a natural windfall within
two decades. As one historian notes,
“Nonetheless, by seeking to look behind
the stereotypes, one can glimpse
the Saudis as they really are—a deeply
religious, traditionally conservative,
proud people who have been forced
to make the transition from the preindustrial
to the modern age in less than
two generations.”13
The glut of oil wealth modernized the
Peninsula, yet it also corrupted its internal
code that identified Arab as an
altogether different breed in the human
race. The rugged, hardworking,
unmaterialistic Arab who was once the
paragon of endurance, forbearance,
and hospitality, was now more drawn
to leisure and extravagance. As it often
is with inherited wealth that is come
by without risk and labor, oil wealth
created an attitude of entitlement. The
inheritors exhibited all the vanity and
pompousness that juxtaposed against
the rusticness of the time before oil
reflected the massive impact of oil
wealth on the Peninsula. This did not
go unnoticed by those who had lived
through the pre and post oil era like
Milad Hanna an Egyptian sociologist,
“who remembers the years before
World War II, when Egyptians would
take up a collection for the ‘poor people
of Mecca in Saudi Arabia’ and
send beautifully embroidered cloth
for the holiest shrines on the Arabian
peninsula. “It was the other way
around then,” he says. ‘We were the
rich country, and looked up to.’”14
An example of this internal “petro-decay”
is the idea of what one architect
calls the “vainest” buildings. The “vainest”
buildings are the type of buildings
that rise into the sky with added features
like spires and unrentable space
at the top that increase the height but
serve no practical function except to
wow and please the eye. UAE, one of
the states in the Arabian Peninsula
tops the list. According to The Council
on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat
(CTBUH), “Unusable space at the top
of the UAE’s 19 tallest buildings was an
average 19 percent of their total height,
a measure it called the “vanity height.”
It goes on to say, “The building with
the largest vanity height is the 2,716
12 July – August 2021 | AL-MADINAH