Aramco World, January–February 1980 cover, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
“I had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian farmlands and Russian steppes south to the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula in their quest for the pure-bred Arabian horses that gave any cavalry an enormous military advantage,” writes one high-spirited contributor to a 2001 issue of Aramco World, the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company.
The article, which has no discernible news peg, explains how nineteenth-century Poles—like Count Wacław Rzewuski, a Warsaw aristocrat-turned-sheik, who disappeared in battle at age fifty-four—contrived to bring Arabian horses to Eastern Europe. Following in the count’s footsteps, the reporter, also a Saudi airline employee, meets Poland’s state inspector of Arabian horse breeding, enumerates the most valuable Arabian mares to “set hoof on Polish soil”—their names were Gazella, Mlecha, and Sahara—and explains how the manuscript of the “count’s account,” Sur les chevaux orientaux et provenants des races orientales, can be viewed by special appointment in Warsaw.
It’s pretty standard fare for this defiant relic of midcentury publishing, which takes as its loose remit the entire Islamic world. Other articles in that issue cover Kashgar, a predominantly Muslim city in China, and mosque design in the United States (headline: “Import, Adapt, Innovate”). Less typical is the front-of-book feature, a four-page photo spread of a patriotic candlelight vigil by Arab Americans in Brooklyn, five days after 9/11. This was the magazine’s first issue after the attacks, which changed everything for Muslims everywhere. “I wanted to show people that we care, too,” reads a quote from the thirteen-year-old Nasser Al-Subai, who had immigrated from Yemen four years prior. A later article on Arab musicians notes that a composer and oud virtuoso named Simon Shaheen had lost friends in the attacks ten days before playing a festival in Bloomington, Indiana, with what one local reviewer described as “immeasurable grace.”
As with most of Aramco World’s coverage, the spread studiously avoids overt political commentary. But the feature nonetheless broke with the frothing bipartisan Islamophobia that marked the post-9/11 years—the era of “WHY THEY HATE US” (the October 2001 Newsweek cover story, illustrated by a turbaned child with a rifle) and “WHY THEY HATE EACH OTHER” (a 2007 cover story in Time). Aramco World’s insistence on the fullness of Arab American life, even immediately after 9/11, captures the magazine’s singular ethos. In 2009, with the forever wars in full swing, the editors noted somewhat euphemistically that “interest in Arab cultures and Islam soared after the horrors of 9/11 and the wars that followed [and] Saudi Aramco World was no longer alone as an intercultural voice.” I would say, rather, that it threw the magazine’s utterly unique sensibility into stark relief. When I stumbled upon it some years later, I subscribed immediately.
Aramco World was launched in 1949, before the OPEC crisis made Saudi Arabia very rich, “as an in-house magazine,” as the former editor William Tracy told Bidoun in 2010, “talking about bowling and, you know, Wanda in accounting is getting married to Joe in engineering.” Over the years, it evolved into a charming and slightly bizarre enclave of print media, combining the recondite trivia of an almanac with the effortful style of the classical general-interest magazine, like Life. Now in its seventy-seventh year, the magazine is mailed out every two months from Texas. Its basic editorial approach, within its aforementioned domain of dar al-Islam, might be best summed up as: Isn’t this cool?
It’s doubtless strange that the wellspring of this warmly humanist project is a rapacious oil company, and that fact has not exactly been irrelevant to its output. The magazine was born from a corporate image crisis in the forties, when “the euphoria of the discovery of oil had been replaced by an increasing suspicion amongst the American public about the company’s business practices,” per a dissertation by Mariam Elnozahy on the magazine’s early years. At Aramco’s Dhahran compound, white American managers enjoyed many privileges denied to Arab workers, and labor strikes were frequent. In place of industrial conflict, the magazine’s early photographs “conjured a fantasy of oil,” depicting “jovial, smiling Arab and American workers on the rig.” In 1955, the novelist Wallace Stegner was hired to write the company’s history for the magazine, though his subsequent manuscript did not fulfill the company’s public relations goals and was suppressed for over a decade. Subtle editorial pressures persisted: Tracy, who edited the magazine from 1967 to 1977, told Bidoun that, when selecting photographs for an article on a state dinner, they would consider which image showed fewer guests sipping wine.
Today, the magazine’s contributor guidelines welcome “coverage of any aspect of a cultural, scientific or historical nature that showcases cross-cultural connections within and beyond the Arab and Muslim world.” But they pointedly do not cover “politics, business news, religion, opinions,” or “conflict or controversy, even if they have positive outcomes.” To wit, the magazine has not really covered Gaza since October 7. (Years earlier, an Aramco World reporter and photographer admitted to Bidoun that Palestine was among the “things that did not get talked about.”) And yet, despite all these asterisks, Aramco World operates in a parallel universe from its corporate parent, evincing a life-affirming cosmopolitanism that many of its independently funded peers do not.
Perhaps that’s why, when I discovered the magazine during the pandemic, I felt like a homing pigeon returning to its crèche. I’ve been drawn to the Islamic world my whole life. Perhaps subconsciously at first, because it seemed doubly other, and doubly compelling, to a child in a Hindu family in post-9/11 America—the Balkans-to-Bengal belt, as the late Islamic scholar Shahab Ahmed put it, appearing like an irresistible, shimmering mass between the places I was “from.” I was absorbed in the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, Avicenna and Babur, the Ottoman harem, and, yes, Orientalist travelogues like The Road to Oxiana. Meanwhile, the War on Terror, like an experimental drug, seemed to miraculously extend the lifespans of legacy media just as they were receiving last rites. This troubled me—not yet because of geopolitical savvy or even principled opposition, but because of simple cognitive dissonance.
In the 2010s, the public conversation around Islam descended further still, due in part to the specter of ISIS, and I suppose it was around then that I realized I had to go to the places I’d been trying to summon from texts. In 2016, I bought a one-way plane ticket to Jakarta, the capital of the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. As a journalist there, I discovered anew how boring it was to instrumentalize a region under the rubrics of “security” and “conflict.” In Jakarta and beyond—Sarajevo, Kano, Jeddah—I drifted inexorably, unjournalistically, toward the interesting, surprising, and delightful: the speck-sized spice island that was traded for Manhattan, the Hausa translations of Ali Shariati that sold briskly in Nigeria.
These sideways discoveries are, as it happens, Aramco World’s bread and butter. Its long-form features—free to read in its digitized archives—traverse such subjects as Tashkent’s Soviet subway stations; Egyptian-style mashrabiya (wooden lattice screen) balconies in Peru; Gulf falconry; the iso-polyphony of Albanian folk music; the migration of camels; Muslim influences on American blues music; Arabic translations of superhero comics (“It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s … Nabil Fawzi!”). “Aramco World really saw itself as a cultural interface between the Middle East and the United States,” said Tracy. “I think there was prescience in that, the idea that greater understanding … would be important in the future. Although I’m not sure that worked out quite the way any of us expected.”
The emphasis on intercultural exchange was a foundation that had been “soundly laid” from the outset, as the editors wrote in their fiftieth-anniversary issue. In the magazine’s very first issue, Aramco’s then-president W.F. Moore had written something like a mission statement: “We wish to break down the walls of isolation so that our people here in America will be helped to see beyond their immediate surroundings.” In the fifties, new Aramco hires took a six-week Arabic language course on Long Island before boarding the “Flying Camel” or the “Flying Gazelle”—company aircraft—to Dhahran. The initial logic for Aramco’s in-house publication, in Tracy’s retelling, was that employees would do better work with their Arab colleagues if they also knew, for instance, that Arabian horses came from Arabia, or if they were made to wonder, “Did you know Arabs eat ice cream? And that they make it in Damascus?”
The Flying Camel by Saudi Aramco, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The teachers of Aramco children soon asked for their own subscriptions, and the magazine “worked up the scale until it was adults talking about adult things.” In 1952 the newsletter became a magazine, published in New York, and in 1964 it moved to Beirut—then a publishing mecca with a color printing press and copious freelance talent, per Tracy. They also brought on Paul Hoye, a former Providence Journal reporter finishing a Ford Foundation Fellowship in “advanced international reporting” at Columbia. (His résumé invariably evokes those “very best men” who staffed so many Cold War outfits, cultural and otherwise.) He would edit the magazine until his death in 1986.
As Aramco World became more outward-facing, aimed at readers not on payroll, management realized, per Tracy in the fiftieth-anniversary issue, that “the company’s public reputation would, to some degree, be riding on the magazine.” It was decided that every article “would be reviewed in Saudi Arabia by Aramco’s Saudi experts, some of great reputation, before publication.” It’s unclear, from this inscrutable wording, whether that meant rubber-stamping, censorship, or something in between, but the editors concede that the practice “grated on Paul Hoye’s newspaperman’s instincts.” As of 1999, “knowledgeable readers in Dhahran” still reviewed the magazine’s texts. (Aramco World did not return a request for comment as to whether this practice was still in place.) The Lebanese Civil War forced the magazine’s headquarters from Beirut to the Hague in 1975, and a decade later, when Hoye died, it moved again, to the petro-metropolis of Houston, where it remains.
As Aramco’s expatriate workforce declined, the outlet evolved into what it is today: the obscure but friendly face of the world’s largest oil company. The project’s widening aperture can be seen, for instance, in the transition from a January 1953 cover story on “Bread: The World’s Food,” illustrated by a baker in the Aramco compound, to a September 1995 article following the “flatbread trail” from “Central Asia to West Asia; to Yemen, Egypt, and Syria; to the Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey, to Azerbaijan, and to Tunisia and Morocco.” Other issues bear the traces of a now-bygone Saudi-American project, like one from 1975, themed “Arabs in America,” or another in 1986, when the Statue of Liberty turned a hundred and Aramco World decided, “like many other publications … to mark the event with a special issue”; their version entailed photographing Arab Americans in every U.S. state.
From the January–February 1980 issue of Aramco World, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
But Aramco World’s genius lies in its more gently gonzo offerings, which tend to be unconcerned with either Saudi Arabia or the United States. My favorite article recounts an epic journey to Uzbekistan to ascertain which of the region’s famous varieties of melon may have been the ones mentioned by the fourteenth-century Tangerine explorer Ibn Battuta. Aramco World has a breathtakingly catholic interpretation of what kinds of people, places, and things fall under its jurisdiction. “What would you have eaten in ninth-century Baghdad?” is the premise of one quite typical 2006 article, which considers the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook, Kitab al-Tabikh. (Though eggplant is now crowned as sayyid al-khudaar, the lord of vegetables, it was once a suspicious novelty from India, “considered impossibly bitter,” blamed by doctors for “everything from freckles and a hoarse throat to cancer and madness”; nevertheless, writes Charles Perry, the Kitab contains seven eggplant recipes, “probably because a taste for eggplant first arose among the aristocracy.”) A 2003 piece tracks an eighteenth-century silver coin called the Maria Theresa thaler from the Habsburg Empire into Africa and Arabia, where it survived in places like Oman as late as 1970. A 2010 feature narrates the experiences of Tichit women in Mauritania, who lead caravans while managing menstruation and pregnancy in the desert.
I’ll be the first to admit that Aramco World’s golden age, as captured in such perfectly delightful flights of inquiry, may have passed: the magazine rolled out the dread “digital-first strategy” in 2023, and its seventy-fifth anniversary occasioned uninspiring headlines like “The Promises and Challenges of AI for Arabic.” Recent issues on the website look markedly worse than those in the digitized archives. Nevertheless, gems still surface, and the website rewards digging. As good a reason to subscribe as any—recall that it’s free—is that the first issue of the (Gregorian) year includes a themed, pull-out wall calendar; last year’s was all about textiles, illustrating months with a horse blanket from Turkmenistan, a Pakistani carpet, a men’s ikat head wrap from Indonesia, the inside of a wooly cape from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. The annotations on every month’s grid take note of, variously, Rabindranath Tagore’s birthday, an exhibition of Turkmen art in Rome, and Eid al-Adha, miniaturizing the magazine’s argument that the world shaped by Islam is not a walled garden.
Somewhat idiosyncratically, the pre-Islamic culture of now-Islamic regions is also fair game, leading to articles on subjects like Hammurabi’s Code, “Assyria to Iberia,” and chess. Typical of the magazine’s kairos is a 2021 cover story on “The Quest for Blue” that forgoes Islamic art clichés about image and ornamentation to recount the ingenuity of humanity’s search for blue pigment, “from Bronze Age Central Asia to early imperial China, from medieval Venice to the modern Maghrib.” The breakthrough, recounted as breathlessly as if it happened at an auction last week, “came more than 5,000 years ago along the banks of the Nile when early Egyptian chemists first brought the color of the sky down to earth.”
This willingness to look beyond, and sometimes before, Islam is not ahistorical kitsch, but a profound comment on how cultures actually accrete over time—how they actually feel. It cuts equally against the literalist Salafi impulse to cast pre-Islamic history as the “age of ignorance” and the Western one to treat Islam as a hermetically sealed civilizational category. As Ahmed, the Pakistani Islamic scholar, wrote in his posthumous 2015 masterpiece, What is Islam? : “It is precisely this correspondence and coherence between Islam as theoretical object or analytical category and Islam as real historical phenomenon that is considerably and crucially lacking in the prevalent conceptualizations of the term ‘Islam/Islamic.’ ”
Few people’s encounters with the Islamic world feel like transgressing a civilizational threshold—certainly not mine. If I had to reach for a primal image, like Bruce Chatwin’s dinosaur hide, that set me off on later peregrinations, it might be the Taj Mahal, first seen at age seven through copious tears; I had expected a private viewing. Nevertheless it was immensely impressive. If you did not grow up with it, you never really get used to the dazzling geometry of Islamic architecture: the ivory dew-drop domes from a distance and the perfectly fitted pietra dura up close, the receding lines of the reflecting pool and consecutive symmetrical vistas framed by Mughal arches, the cool internal breeze defying the radiant heat of cow-belt India. Being not particularly in touch with the death drive, I was puzzled by the monument’s macabre raison d’être, and upset that the woman for whom it was built never saw it. Still, an awesome sight like that can certainly knock you off course—if not quite in a straight line, then to Indonesia, or Kosovo. In truth, my interest is not so much a quest to be completed as a sensibility reinforced over time—the same one that animates much of Aramco World. Naturally, the magazine has covered the Taj (high Aramcore) several times, from a 1968 paean to the “gem of gems’” architecture to a 2024 essay on its artistic depictions during the Raj.
Despite its aggressively light, even lightweight, approach, Aramco World has a higher purpose, I think, in a time when Muslim lives and societies are still routinely treated with indifference, hysteria, or cruelty. Perhaps the magazine’s charms also include blunting the literary disappointment of what Amitav Ghosh called the “Oil Encounter” between the U.S. and the Middle East. “To a great many Americans,” he observed, oil “reeks of unavoidable overseas entanglements, a worrisome foreign dependency, economic uncertainty, risky and expensive military enterprises; of thousands of dead civilians and children and all the troublesome questions that lie buried in their graves.” By the time it enters the realm of fiction, it has “more than just a whiff of that deep suspicion of the Arab and Muslim worlds that wafts through so much of American intellectual life … it becomes a Problem that can be written about only in the language of Solutions.” Gently but consistently resisting this language of problems is what elevates the project of Aramco World, the Oil Encounter’s unlikeliest child.