Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif

The Unseen Book Club

This first novel in Abdelrahman Munif’s masterful quintet depicts sweeping social and economic transformations in the Arabian peninsula during the development of oil reserves for global export. Written in Paris and first published in Arabic in 1984, Cities of Salt follows members of a Bedouin village somewhere near the Persian Gulf as local elites invite American companies to prospect for oil. Their lives and relationships undergo continuous ruptures as they must adapt to the new world being built around them.

We talk about Munif’s political origins in the Baath party, the Lovecraftian horrors of oil, the inseparability of culture and political economy, the sorrow and pain of losing collective identity, and the process of forming new social consciousness in a site of capitalist extraction.

Notes and References:

Sabry Hafez: ‘An Arabian Master,'
New Left Review 37
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii37/articles/sabry-hafez-an-arabian-master

Writing a Tool for Change: Abd al-Rahman Munif Remembered
MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, Spring 2007
https://dome.mit.edu/handle/1721.3/177979

Aramco: Era of Discovery (1984) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHh6wY2ua08
Odd orientalist propaganda documentary describing the earliest days of oil prospecting and development that led the formation of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO)

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