No longer simply a handbook for Aramco employees, this volume provides background information on Islam, the Arab world, and the oil industry.

Includes facsimile items and memorabilia.

Saudi Arabia is a young nation with an ancient history. It is one of the most conservative traditional societies in the world grappling with the impact of modernization wrought by the influx of great oil wealth beginning only in the mid twentieth century. Saudi culture is in constant flux, and the culture gap between the West and Saudi Islamic culture is wide. Culture and Customs of Saudi Arabia is the first cultural overview of country and provides timely, authoritative insight into a major Middle Eastern power. The Saudis are a proud people with a closed society, but circumstances have caused them to play an important role in current world affairs. The author has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia and has extensively used his contacts there to provide up-to-date material. Saudi culture developed through age-old interactions between the Arabian peoples and their harsh desert environment. Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, and the basic Islamic values of Saudi culture have remained to this day. The themes of an ancient desert society infused with Islam values on a collision course with modernity are interplayed throughout chapters on the land, people, and history, traditional Islamic culture and modernization, the extended family and gender roles, cuisine and dress, social customs, rites of passage, and holidays, communication and mass media, and artistic expression. Color photos and a map, chronology, and glossary round out the narrative.

Now newly updated, America's Kingdom debunks the many myths that now surround the United States's special relationship with Saudi Arabia, also known as "the deal": oil for security. Exploding the long-established myth that the Arabian American Oil Company, Aramco, made miracles happen in the desert, Robert Vitalis shows how oil led the US government to follow the company to the kingdom, and how oil and Aramco quickly became America's largest single overseas private enterprise. From the establishment in the 1930s of a Jim Crow system in the Dhahran oil camps, to the consolidation of America's Kingdom under the House of Fahd, the royal faction that still rules today, this is a meticulously researched account of Aramco as a microcosm of the colonial order.

In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.

As the first British woman convert to Islam on record as having made the pilgrimage to Makkah and the visit to the Prophet's Tomb at Madinah, Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867-1963) cuts a unique figure in the annals of the Muslim Hajj. Lady Evelyn was in her mid-sixties when she decided to go on the Hajj. Daughter of the distinguished Scottish explorer Lord Dunmore, granddaughter of the Earl of Leicester, and great-niece of the notorious romantic Lady Jane Digby el-Mezrab, the young Evelyn Murray had spent childhood winters in North Africa. There she had been imbued with the Muslim way of life, becoming, as she puts it, 'a little Muslim at heart'. Before and after the First World War she travelled widely in Egypt, Syria and Transjordan. While strongly drawn to the Arab world, she maintained a conventional place in society at home, marrying the wealthy John Cobbold in 1891 and devoting herself to her Suffolk house and Scottish estate, her gardens, and especially deer-stalking in the Highlands, of which she was a renowned exponent. When her husband, by then High Sheriff of Suffolk, died in 1929, Lady Evelyn decided to perform the pilgrimage. Arriving at Jiddah by steamer from Suez in February 1933, she stayed with the Philbys and entered into the life of Jiddah's foreign community while waiting to obtain permission to perform the Haj. In doing so, she had to overcome the considerable suspicion surrounding foreign 'converts' who, Muslims felt, made the pilgrimage and then wrote about it as a dangerous and sensational adventure. While in Jiddah she received visits from various officials of the royal court, notably the King's son the Amir Faysal (later King Faysal). PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA is as much an account of an interior journey of faith as a conventional travelogue. It takes the form of a day-by-day journal, interspersed with digressions on the history and merits of Islam. While awaiting permission to go to Makkah, she was allowed to travel to Madinah, of which she gives an enchanting account. She is the first English writer to give a first-hand description of the life of the women's quarters of the households in which she stayed in Madinah, Makkah and Muna -- an account remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. Her book was published in 1934 to favourable reviews but has never until now been reprinted. This new edition, with a biographical introduction by William Facey and Lady Evelyn's great-great-niece Miranda Taylor, serves to rescue this unique and intriguing Anglo-Muslim from the neglect that has since befallen her, even among scholars specialising in women travellers.