Soft Power

I FLEW TO JEDDAH because I wanted to see a society in the throes of change. Why, I wondered, is Saudi Arabia the place where peace deals are now brokered, international investment drummed up, and new cities carved into the ground? Just six years after the kingdom first opened for nonreligious tourism, international crowds now gather at the ancient heritage sites of AlUla and Diriyah, drawn by festivals and sustainable hotels. Soft power, innovation through tradition, and political might are aligning here in a way that reflects our new and contradictory world order.

All of this was on my mind as I headed toward the second Islamic Arts Biennale, installed across several stunningly high-ceilinged, fabric-clad enclosures in the Western Hajj terminal complex abutting Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz Airport. The choice of site was both shrewd and significant: The huge, semi-outdoor terminal, which resembles a field of tall-stemmed, dust-colored umbrellas, opened in 1981 as a transfer site for religious pilgrims (it can hold up to eighty thousand at once) venturing to the holy sites. These are the same tourists who, in 2025, will make up a significant portion of the biennial’s audience. If the idea of a new biennial inspires skepticism among jaded art viewers asking, “Why, here, now?” then—for starters—consider that, for many, it will be their first time engaging with a big art exhibition. Another justification is the sheer number of visitors: In 2023 there were about six hundred thousand of them, and this year they expect even more—pilgrims, local schoolchildren, political dignitaries.

Then there’s the work. Earlier that day, I’d been squinting, mouth agape, at vitrines containing early manuscripts whose effect in their time was nothing short of world-historical. Here was a fourteenth-century manuscript copy (about the earliest we have) of the Liber Abaci (The Book of Calculation, 1202), in which Fibonacci revolutionized European mathematics by introducing Arabic numerals and positional notation. It’s in this text that the digit 0 was first rendered in Roman script. The tiny oval in front of me, handwritten on a piece of parchment in angular red-and-black calligraphy, would eventually enable everything from decimals to bookkeeping to binary code. The exhibition shows how it was only thanks to Fibonacci’s reading of Muhammad bin Musa Al-Khwarizmi that we use it today. Al-Khwarizmi, a ninth-century Baghdad-based polymath, traveled to India and marveled at a device tradesmen used to make calculations quickly: the concept of zero. Al-Khwarizmi’s Kitab al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabalah (written between 813 and 846 CE)—here in a rare thirteenth-century manuscript edition, loaned from the King Abdulaziz Library in Medina—is the book on algebra (from the word al-Jabr, “restoring,” in its title). The word algorithm is a partial transliteration of Al-Khwarizmi’s name.

The old story is that the knowledge of antiquity was preserved during the Dark Ages by medieval Muslim scholars. This show refines that narrative. Actually, in the flourishing world of eighth-century Abbasid Baghdad, Greek manuscripts were not simply translated but revised, challenged, and improved. The tenth-century astronomer al-Sufi translated Ptolemy—and in the process corrected his star catalogues, leading to the first illustrated star chart in history. Here, twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts from Iraq and Morocco, loaned from Doha and the Vatican, revive al-Sufi’s triumph of astronomy, mathematics, and visual imagination, culminating in the stellar image of Andromeda, the mythical daughter of the king of ancient Ethiopia. It’s an exhilarating story. Through the hand of Al-Khwarizmi and Fibonacci, Al-Tusi and Copernicus, we glimpse the leaps, inventions, annotations, and disputations that are the shaky foundations of our world. And we will likely never see them displayed this way again.

While I was looking at the vitrines, a man in a white cassock stood next to me. He was a librarian from the Vatican, speaking English with a young Saudi woman in a hijab. The document in front of them contained the earliest-ever translation of the holy text of Islam, which is also the magnum opus of Arabic literature. The translation was preserved via a polemical refutation of the Qur’an by Nicetas of Byzantium, itself representing the first time the Qur’an was read against itself as a theological document. Now, in 2025, I heard the Vatican representative telling the Saudi woman how Nicetas had misread the Qur’an by shoehorning Islamic concepts into a Christian theological framework. Where else would one see a young woman in a headdress talking to a scholar from the Vatican about a Byzantine-era disputation against “heretical” Islam?

The Islamic Arts Biennale is one of two new biennials helmed by the same organization, the Diriyah Biennale Foundation, founded by the Saudi Ministry of Culture in 2020. It’s the soft-power part of Mohammed bin Salman’s sweeping effort to assert Saudi influence on the world stage and wean the nation off of oil. Modern states have diversified economies and multipolar alliances; they have sustainable hotels, food, and tourism; they have mechanisms for government accountability, non-corruption, and digital access; and they also put on biennials. Here worldwide audiences congregate to be entertained and educated, complementing the kingdom’s massive infrastructural expansion. Crucially, culture also serves a convincing role locally, educating and employing a young workforce. The Saudi public is overwhelmingly young (63 percent are below thirty, among the youngest in the Gulf) and its personnel increasingly female (the proportion of women employed has more than doubled in a decade). If he’s to make good on his ambitions, the crown prince ought to see that a young, increasingly female Saudi workforce represents the kingdom’s most obvious, and most humane, agency for change.

Ambition: That’s the word that stands out when I consider this biennial’s assembly of expertise, resources, and thoughtfulness of execution. Its directors—Julian Raby, director emeritus of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art; author and historian Abdul Rahman Azzam; Amin Jaffer (director of the Al Thani Collection and former V&A curator); and Saudi contemporary artist Muhannad Shono—mobilized a massive network of international institutions. The Vatican is perhaps the most eye-raising envoy, loaning (among others) a twenty-three-foot-long world map documenting the seventeenth-century Ottoman explorer Evliya Çelebi’s travels. (It’s quid pro quo: The Saudi government is funding its restoration.) There are tiles from the Alhambra, musical instruments and arms from the Al Thani Collection in Paris, ornate jewel boxes from the West Nusa Tenggara State Museum in Indonesia. Iranian velvets come from Italy’s Bruschettini Foundation for Islamic and Asian Art. A talismanic shirt contains the entire text of the Qur’an, loaned from Qatar. Some thirty institutions collaborated on this colossal project, including the Two Holy Mosques of Islam, of which the Saudi monarch is the official custodian.

Revealed in Mecca and Medina in the early seventh century, compiled in the decades that followed, polemicized after that, and since then the source of religious devotion and legal doctrine, the Qur’an also possesses a unique aesthetic beauty—a union of oral poetry and visual form—that is readily apparent to the faithful. Those of us who are secular viewers will have to make do with approximations about how its holy function is intertwined with its aesthetic form. We can, however, be stunned by the sheer diversity of Qur’anic copies and translations on display—from Russia, from the Sahel, from Sicily but translated into Hebrew. Pilgrims, whether hailing from Xinjiang, Andalusia, or North Africa, would traditionally leave their most cherished copy of the Qur’an at the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina (built by Mohammed and containing his tomb). Even for the outside observer, the assembly’s beauty is remarkable. “The intellectual and often physical conflict surrounding the Qur’an which is being played out today in the Islamic world is also a conflict about its aesthetic dimension, which some feel is in danger of being lost,” wrote the German Iranian scholar Navid Kermani. “It never failed to amaze me when I asked [Egyptian cabdrivers] why, when caught in a traffic jam in scorching heat, they put on a cassette of Qur’an recitations. . . . The answer I heard again and again was, ‘It’s so beautiful (gamīil gaddan)!’”

In comparison with the show’s historical treasures, works by Saudi contemporary artists, many arranged outdoors as in an Islamic garden, seemed thin. I got a better glimpse of living tradition by admiring the architectural carvings done by the students in the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts: Their wooden rawasheen (traditional wooden inlay and coverings that line the balconies of old Jeddah houses) made the show’s historical through line—mathematics unfolding into astronomy, music, and architectural proportion—come alive. 

For many, though, the key exhibit here will be the kiswa, the black textile covering that envelops the Kaaba in Mecca. Each year, a new kiswa is sewn, the old one taken down and cut to pieces. This is the first time a kiswa has ever been seen publicly as a complete object outside Mecca. It’s a formidable presence,  transducing the magnetism of the billions of people who encircled, approached, and prayed toward this object five times daily. I may not respond to these religious artifacts in the same way as my Muslim neighbor, and certainly I cannot grasp their significance as a pilgrim might. But that speaks to this biennial’s impressive versatility: It brings together high and vernacular, sacred and profane, balancing the universalizing, centralizing force of Islam with the diversity of its manifestations.

Still, the display of religious objects here invites serious questions. What does the word Islamic in Islamic art mean? Because Islamic territories included (among others) Persian, Byzantine, Chinese, and Central Asian geographies, not to mention Andalusian Spain and North Africa, many works correctly termed Islamic were made for or by non-Muslims: Jews, Christians, or Buddhists living in Muslim-dominated territories. Art historian Oleg Grabar convincingly argued that the term Islamic art is a generic category that resolves, imperfectly, the tension between local traditions and overarching ideals—similar to “Baroque” or “Gothic.” For Grabar, “Islamic art” is a “special overlay, a deforming or refracting prism which transformed, at times temporarily or imperfectly, at other times permanently, some local energies and traditions” in the wake of Muslim expansion.

Throughout the twentieth century, Western institutions wedged together distinct artistic traditions under specious principles of visual similarity: Decorative arts, calligraphy, and architecture were lumped with a mishmash of objects of dynastic origin: glassware, carpets, miniatures, arms. Even today, the Al Thani Collection’s presence in Paris—not Qatar—is a product of Qatari cultural diplomacy. as well as prestige: Europe as the traditional pedigree-granting site. In twentieth-century London, real erudition often overlapped with the private interests of foundations and collections amassed via economic and political tumult (such as the Khalili Collections); the geographic diffusion of art from Islamic territories meant that serious research often stressed some aspect (such as Persian or Mughal-era art) while ignoring others. The intricate, Nasrid-period architectural ceiling loaned here from the Victoria and Albert Museum is typical: Made in Granada, al-Andalus, it was unearthed from a ruin (bought, most likely, for about six pounds) around 1880 by the V&A’s globe-trotting director, Caspar Purdon Clarke, and is loaned now to Jeddah in what is partly a symbolically restorative act.

Only recently has the Muslim world begun to take charge of writing its own history through objects. While Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha have set the stage, an unbelievable number of new museums are set to open in the region or have recently done so. The Lusail Museum (opening in 2029) and the Art Mill Museum (set to open in 2030) in Qatar and Abu Dhabi’s Guggen­heim Abu Dhabi, Zayed National Museum, Natural History Museum, and Louvre will aim to reverse this westward drift of objects of Islamic origin, and reorient their research and display. But will they succeed?

“If you want soccer,” a curator told me during my trip, “you can build stadiums, or you can build neighborhoods.” His meaning was clear: The Gulf’s plum infrastructural projects—Qatar’s soccer stadiums, Abu Dhabi’s swish museums—are impressive, yet lack anything but a fly-over public. Saudi Arabia, while it has its share of prestige projects, is determined not to repeat the mistakes of its neighbors. Instead, it is making local inroads, investing in its public and building “neighborhoods” such as this biennial. The elephant in the room is the mass of human rights abuses. The optimist in me believes that change is on the way. Consider the radical labor program known as nitaqat, also called the “Saudi Nationalization Scheme.” Begun in 2011, nitaqat incentivizes companies to employ Saudi workers over international ones. After a rocky start, including swift expulsions of illegal migrants, the nitaqat program might be finding its footing. An educated, largely young, and predominantly Saudi workforce will occupy the roles that international workers—from high-flying expats to exploited migrants—have taken on in Dubai or Doha.

Change in today’s Saudi Arabia is forward-looking and retrograde. Women have been granted a few hard-earned rights. Other groups must continue to wait. It is easy to criticize the kingdom’s human rights record, crackdown on press, and heinous executions of dis­sidents. At the same time, there is a sense of palpable seriousness and substantiveness to the country’s ambitions to reform. This highly contradictory state of affairs comes at a moment when the West’s moral authority has all but crumbled. Who are we to speak, really? All around us, the world is sliding into regression. For Saudi Arabia, the future isn’t simply a forward step, but a shuffle between precedent and progress. 

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