Jörg Matthias Determann's Historiography in Saudi Arabia explains the telling and retelling of Saudi history by Saudi scholars, characterizing modern Saudi historiography as a plurality of historical narratives. Determann's central argument is that Saudi scholars in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have produced a broad range of modern Saudi history. These works include dynastic histories and social and economic histories, as well as local, tribal, and Shiʿi histories, which can be compared and contrasted in order to identify the changes and continuities in the production of Saudi history. Determann states that his main aim is to provide “a deeper understanding” of how Saudi narrative plurality emerged (6). Indeed, the strength of this work is Determann's ability to identify and describe the strategies, goals, sources, and objects of modern Saudi historians.And yet this book is more than just a scholar presenting modern Saudi historical production, written for the most part in Arabic, to a Western audience. Determann explains how his work fits into the broader scholarship on Arab historiography. In doing so, he makes two important observations. First, Determann shows how and when Saudi historical production became national, contributing to the emergence of a nascent Saudi nationalism (4). This point, supported by logic and evidence throughout the book, is a groundbreaking and bold argument. Second, Determann argues that Saudi narrative plurality challenges the prevailing assumption that authoritarian governments prevent or severely constrain diverse historical production. Determann points out that while many scholars of Arab historiography have focused on demonstrating how historical writing was used in service of the state, very few scholars have examined how historical diversity could be seen as a sign “that state control over historical production was not complete” (7). Here Determann makes a particularly interesting observation. Referring to separate works by Thomas Mayer and Meir Hatina on Egyptian historiography (9), he points out that historiographical plurality has typically been associated with political plurality. Therefore, despite being “among the least democratic and pluralistic countries even in the Arab world,” Saudi Arabia has a “multiplicity of voices about the past that emerged in the absence of political pluralism” (9–10). This book seeks to explain this apparent paradox.In the book's third chapter, one that lends itself well to a graduate seminar on Saudi Arabia, Determann describes how dynastic histories in the Saudi kingdom became “national.” He explains how a new group of professional Saudi historians, who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, reframed the basis of legitimacy for the Saudi dynasty. These Saudi scholars presented dynastic histories that replaced narratives based on premodern Islamic exclusivism and conquest with narratives based on modern national unification and development. In the 1960s, a nascent Saudi identity and nationalism started to emerge from the infancy of Saudi nation building. A unified educational system and national economy took root in the kingdom, and every part of Saudi society experienced some contact with the state. Alongside these institutional changes, Saudi history was slowly becoming nationalized or “Saudized.” This meant that instead of framing Saudi history in terms of an Islamic revival, or juxtaposed in contrast to Arab nationalism, Saudi leaders were cast as founders and unifiers of a modern Saudi nation. In the words of Determann, a foundation and unification (tawhid) paradigm was beginning to replace the takfiri paradigm1 of Islamic revival (137–38) in Saudi history.To be sure, former Saudi Grand Mufti ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Baz (1993–99) saw the secular character of nationalism as undermining Islam. Safar al-Hawali, an influential Saudi intellectual from Mecca, arguing in the tradition of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, claimed that nationalism was a Western import designed to prevent Islamic unity (113). But Saudi national identity did not replace religious, regional, or tribal identities. Rather, it was added to those identities as a superstructure. Determann points out that beginning in the 1970s, “many historians of towns, tribes, and the Shiʿa adopted national narratives, including those of unification and development. They thus acknowledged the existence of, and to a certain extent legitimized, the nation state” (140). Determann suggests that a new national historiography reinforced and strengthened Saudi solidarity, adding to the Arab and Islamic elements of Saudi identity.For example, Saudi historians reframed the recapturing of Riyadh in 1902 in national terminology. King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz and his sixty companions engaged in a “military commando operation” rather than a “conquest” (102–3) in order to transform the events into a Saudi national myth rather than an Islamic-Arab one. In 1999, ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Ruwayshid led a centennial commemoration of the capture of Riyadh by publishing a compilation of biographies of the Saudi participants, The Sixty Men of Eternal Memory: The Forefront of Recovery of Riyadh and the Unification of the Kingdom, in order to emphasize that the recovery of Riyadh was a “first step” toward the nation's unification. Determann creatively compared the Saudi effort to create a founder paradigm around ʿAbd al-ʿAziz to modern Egyptian historiography's treatment of Muhammad ʿAli (1805–48).Determann also demonstrates that recent Saudi historiography has combined the theme of ʿAbd al-ʿAziz as founder with the idea of national unification. Instead of restorers of Islam and champions of the Arab world, the Saud family was recast as unifiers of the Saudi nation. The term “unification” replaced “jihad” and “conquest,” and historians emphasized that the pre-Wahhabi era was one of political disunity rather than Islamic ignorance characterized by corrupt and forbidden religious innovation.Determann persuasively argues that the maturation of the historical profession in the kingdom provided the established Wahhabi narrative of takfirism with a scholarly platform but also sowed the seeds of its erosion, by nurturing a new generation of intellectuals that created a new national discourse. For example, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Khowaiter obtained a PhD from School of Oriental and African Studies (in London) in 1960, and, after taking his undergraduate degree at Cairo University, was appointed by King Faisal to teach history at King Saud University from 1961 to 1971. Khowaiter was responsible for training the first generation of professional Saudi historians, which critically applied a variety of source materials in their work.ʿAbd ʿAllah al-ʿUthaymin, a student at King Saud, who later completed a PhD about Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab under Montgomery Watt at the University of Edinburgh, was one of the first Saudi scholars to challenge the dominant takfiri paradigm that pre-Wahhabi Najd was a scene of Islamic ignorance (jahiliyah). Using new sources, such as vernacular poetry and the chronicles of al-Manqur and al-Fakhiri, ʿUthaymin demonstrated that Najd was the homeland of important religious scholars and that most of the region's urban inhabitants were faithful Muslims. ʿUthaymin criticized the early takfirist chronicles, conceding that while there was a small number of ignorant people who engaged in polytheistic rituals, there was also a great number of people strictly adhering to the shariʿa and the principles of praxis of Islam. In place of the takfirist paradigm, he described the Wahhabi Mission as a unifying force seeking security and stability in a context of political division between rival emirates and tribes, without a central authority.Al-ʿUthaymin was also responsible for changing the language used in Saudi textbooks to describe Saudi expansion. Instead of takfirist terms like jihad, fath (conquest), and ghazwah (raid), ʿUthaymin used tawhid (unification or restoration) and damm (annexation or joining) to characterize the territorial consolidation of the Arabian Peninsula under Saud leadership. These new terms appeared in the kingdom's standard textbooks and other publications that were widely used by the Ministry of Education. They were also used in publications issued by the King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Foundation for Research and Archives.The second new element of Saudi historiography, according to Determann, built on the “foundation-as-unification paradigm” and attempted to legitimize the Saudi dynasty as the spearhead of national development. In terms of identity, development achievements were linked to national progress, which was to serve as an important source of national pride for Saudis and as an example to the Arab and Islamic worlds.The idea of national development emerged in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s in response to Nasser's revolutionary Arab nationalism, which attempted to portray the Saudi kingdom as “reactionary” and “backward.” The monarchic regime and the emphasis on a Wahhabi revival were viewed as anachronistic during the twentieth century. King Faisal responded to an interviewer in 1972 by arguing that “the important thing is not the name, but the application. Any regime, whether it is monarchical or republican, should reflect benevolence and progress.”In 1970, the kingdom, supported by American consultants, started its first five-year development plan. King Faisal was cast as a leader of national development, and Saudi textbooks described an era of “agricultural renaissance,” “educational renaissance,” and the development of communication and health care. The king promoted new intellectual elites that were educated in secular subjects abroad rather than in Islamic studies. The Ministry of Information became a key institution promoting the kingdom's narratives of technocratic development. Performance reports and development achievements were turned into published narratives like The Development of Electricity over the Last Hundred Years and Transportation and Telecommunications in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during 100 Years. Mayy al-ʿIsa, one of the first female professional historians in Saudi Arabia, argued in the Saudi journal al-Dirʿiyah in 2001 that “the power of states manifests itself in their development achievements,” and “history immortalizes the names of great leaders to that the extent that they achieved resurgence, development, and progress for their country.” During the last thirty years of the twentieth century, the story of Saudi modernization, which was portrayed in terms of unqualified economic and technological progress and success, was transformed into an important nation-building theme in Saudi historiography.However, these new narratives weren't erasing the old, according to Determann. Instead, these narratives sought to reinforce a particularistic Saudi political identity from the core building blocks of Arab and Islamic cultural identity. Saudi historian ʿAbd ʿAllah al-ʿUthaymin explained his loyalties in terms of concentric circles: “In the first circle, I am the son of the Arabian peninsula. The regions of the peninsula were united under the kingdom. Hence, I am a Saudi. Then there is the wider region: I am an Arab. Then I am a Muslim” (103). ʿUthaymin's perspective was not that of an outsider. As a scholar and full professor at King Saud University, he was not an outlier in Saudi society. In fact, not only part of the kingdom's intellectual elite, he was also part of the kingdom's bureaucracy, serving as a member of the Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Council) for the maximum three terms, from 1999 to 2009.In the fourth chapter, “Asserting Towns, Tribes and the Shiites in National History, 1970s to Present,” Determann makes several claims that are convincing yet run against the grain of the conventional scholarly wisdom about Saudi Arabia. Broadly, Determann argues that local and tribal histories have adopted the national framework, as well as the dynastic narratives of unification and development. Instead of particularistic histories competing with dynastic histories as alternative representations to the dominant dynastic histories, many local, tribal, and Shiʿi historians now produce “contribution histories,” which are intended to demonstrate their communities' contribution to Saudi history (217). Determann argues that this is the result of state expansion and globalization. These two processes provided more access to higher education; new state institutions to support advanced historical research; and oil wealth, which created social mobility and generated new historical perspectives.Determann, in support of this argument, traces the historical production in ʿAsir (a province on the southwest coast of Saudi Arabia), showing how historian Mohammed Al Zulfa challenged the traditional notion that the history of the kingdom was the history of the Al Saud family. Instead, he tried to demonstrate how Asir was the “corner stone” of Saudi state formation, arguing that its fertile highlands fed Saudi armies and was the source of secure borders with Yemen (143). Determann also argues that tribal histories seek to highlight their contribution to national unity. Perhaps more controversially, Determann claims that despite Shiʿi historical production that rejects the dynastic histories that champion unification, dissident Shiʿi narratives, like that of Muhammad ʿAbd al-Majid's 1992 Sectarian Discrimination of Saudi Arabia, still “emphasize the Shiites' rights as an integral part of the nation” and praise “the Shiites' contribution to the nation and its unity” (169–70).Determann's second broad analytical point rests on his claim that despite official censorship in the kingdom, the expansion of the Saudi state in the twentieth century contributed to diverse historical production (219). Referring to the work of Khalid al-Dakhil and Turki al-Hamad (202–14), among others, Determann argues that recent Saudi scholarship has indeed succeeded in “challenging the narratives of the Saudi state as a primarily religious project” (223). Determann suggests that perhaps there has been more plurality in Arab historiography than previously understood. Determann's claim that historical plurality has contributed to greater (not great) political plurality is perhaps his boldest argument. It is also the one that rests on least amount of evidence. He claims that state expansion and globalization “contributed to a political opening of Saudi Arabia in the early twenty-first century, which may allow for future historiographical plurality” (227). He sees “the pluralization of Saudi politics” as the result of the “long-term empowerment of citizens through state-financed education and new technologies” (228). This is an intriguing argument and one I am sure many scholars of modern Saudi Arabia will want to reexamine in the future.Seventy percent of the Saudi population is under the age of thirty. That means more than two-thirds of the population has no direct memory of the 1990–91 Gulf War to roll back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, much less the establishment of the Saudi kingdom and the challenge of revolutionary Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. In the intervening fifty years, Saudi historians, influenced by modern research methods, have produced new narratives to revise the early chronicles of Saudi history that legitimized the Saud family dynasty based on its role of spreading the Wahhabi Mission through jihad and conquest. The attempt to forge a new legitimacy for the Saudi dynasty based on narratives that emphasize national unification and development represents a new phase of Saudi national identity. Indeed, in this book, Determann even refers to the “growth of Saudi nationalism” (217).It is impossible to accurately measure how the historical narratives Determann so capably describes are received, or how, if at all, they have shaped and influenced the collective identity of today's youthful Saudi majority. Nevertheless, it may be fair to say these new Saudi histories have helped to condition a new generation of Saudi youth for a more particularistic sense of political solidarity and loyalty. Determann's book not only introduces the West to developments in Saudi historical scholarship, but it also breaks new ground on when and how the process of historical pluralism emerged in what is often characterized as the authoritarian political environment of the Saudi kingdom.