'Cities of Salt' by Peter Theroux: Grim tale of greed for black gold

When his son Fawaz mentions the presence of Arabic-speaking foreigners in Wadi al-Uyoun, Miteb al-Hathal chooses not to pay attention, thinking it’s just the boy’s way of once again pleading to be allowed to travel in a caravan and see the world beyond their desert oasis. However, when Fawaz says that one of them recited the Shahada at the behest of a tribal elder, Ibn Rashed, something awakens in Miteb. And when he learns that they have come to look for water, Miteb wastes no time in setting off for Ibn Rashed’s encampment and questioning these foreigners himself. What he observes there transforms Miteb, turning him into the proverbial canary in the verdant oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun. How is no one else seeing what he sees: that these men from other lands with their evasive answers and strange iron tools are definitely not looking for water but something else altogether?

So begins Abdelrahman Munif’s landmark work of petrofiction, Cities of Salt, originally published in Arabic in 1984 and translated into English by Peter Theroux.

The novel, the first in a trilogy in English (published as a quintet of books in Arabic), traces the transformation of a traditional Arabian Gulf kingdom in the 1930s with the arrival of American oil prospectors, the conflicts that erupt between two vastly different cultures, the corrosive effects of sudden wealth and modern technology on nomadic and agrarian lives that had remained unchanged for centuries, the entrenchment of inequality, and the concentration of power among an autocratic class ill-suited to ruling a rapidly changing country. Like all Cassandras, Miteb finds his pronouncements of doom falling on deaf ears: Ibn Rashed has the support of the emir, who has permitted the Americans to carry out their exploration. Miteb is dismissed as a troublemaker.

The rest of the tribes and clans soon come to regret not supporting Miteb — they are exiled from the wadi, with the promise of new houses in another settlement that does not immediately materialise. Miteb chooses to go his own way, riding a camel into the desert.

All this happens within the first third of Cities of Salt — it’s a long novel, packed with detail and unfolding at a deliberate, carefully considered pace that conjures a world that disappeared with the discovery of oil. After the exodus from Wadi al-Uyoun, we follow the lives of Fawaz and other men from the wadi until they reach the coastal settlement of Harran, which is where the bulk of the novel takes place. Here by the sea, the Americans, now acting as a commercial enterprise, are establishing their own camp and need the locals to work on the construction sites, the oil pipelines, the port and more.

Here too, Ibn Rashed inveigles his way into the graces of the local emir, who proves to be as greedy as he is, and power plays soon unfold between various courtiers, the Americans and their Arab management, the locals who’ve spotted business opportunities in setting up a township for the workers and sundry other blow-ins who’ve heard they can make their fortune in Harran. There are deaths, there are workers’ revolts, there is merciless repression: there are clear winners and losers in this grim tale of the destruction of nature and man’s irrepressible thirst for petroleum.

When Cities of Salt was published, Munif, an oil economist, was stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and the book and its sequels were banned across the Gulf. It’s easy to see why: the story it recounts is, in essence, that of modern Saudi Arabia, the birth of its state oil company and the foundation of cities like Dammam.

The tale is not flattering in its depiction of the venal sheikhs who sold their land and people to foreign enterprises. Rummaging around the Qatar Digital Library archives recently, I found an intelligence report sent to the colonial India office in the late 1930s, detailing Ibn Saud’s complaints about a banquet arranged by the California Arabian Standard Oil Company in Dammam, where he was “compelled to chase food unsuccessfully all around the table with a spoon and fork”. It’s a scene that would have fit right into Cities of Salt.

That One Book is a monthly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. The author is a writer and communications professional. She blogs at  saudha.substack.com