Is Saudi Arabia finally taking an interest in its own heritage?

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Tell people in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that you are on your way to al-Qassem province and they raise their eyebrows. Al-Qassem is, even in this deeply conservative country, deeply conservative. It is a two- to three-hour drive west along the main highway, and smack in the middle of the arid interior. Over recent decades several cities in al-Qassem have seen revolts against the Saudi royal family’s authority, led by clerics who have denounced their rulers as dangerous reformers and moderates. There are few tourists in Saudi Arabia and even fewer out in al-Qassem.

Dr Ibrahim Darwish, a religious scholar and sociologist who runs a thinktank in the province’s third-largest town, Rass, describes a "closed and solid" society that is "traditional, hospitable, generous and plainspeaking".

It is also a society that has changed very fast – even in a region where it is a commonplace to talk of the speed of transformation. In Saudi Arabia, where exceptional wealth came to a desert people without the cultural heritage of other local states such as Egypt, Iran or Turkey, the lives of parents, let alone grandparents or great grandparents, are unrecognisable to young people.

So in Rass, the local authorities have built a museum dedicated to the days gone by. It occupies the corner of one of the modern shopping centres that, along with mosques, are the focus of most public life in Saudi Arabia. It is not very large. One room is dedicated to a reconstruction of a rural home, complete with well and ingenious mud-piping that allowed farmers to shower. Another is full of rifles and swords. A third is crammed with looms and textiles.

The biggest space is a reproduction coffee-house with rugs on the floor and painted shutters where Suleiman Mohammed al’Dubayan, 56, is usually to be found. A retired soldier, he is employed by the municipality to wear traditional clothes and make coffee, in the traditional manner, for visitors.

Al’Dubayan sees up to 100 people a day, he says, mainly "young men who come here searching. They need to know about how it was before. They ask me about making coffee, about the old days. So I tell them."

The museum in Rass is part of a broader phenomenon in Saudi Arabia: the rediscovery of the kingdom’s past. Neither during the first decades of the consolidation of the 79-year-old country nor in the heady rush of development and stupendous wealth since the early 1970s did anyone pay much attention to preservation. There are very few buildings that are more than 30 or 40 years old. In Riyadh, there is the masmak – the old fort that was used by the city’s 19th-century rulers, close to the headquarters of the religious police – and there is a warren of crumbling old mud-walled houses in the centre of the city where migrant labourers from India and the far east live in squalor. Then there is the restored 19th-century palace a short drive outside the capital where you can watch poorly paid Bangladeshis on short-term visas pretend to be "olden day" Saudi village dwellers. But almost everything else is systematically flattened to make way for the latest skyscraper or apartment block.

The Rass museum is one of many signs that this is changing. There are currently two Unesco-listed sites in the kingdom – the ruined town of Ad-Dir’iyah and the ancient remains of the oasis of Al-Hijr in the northwest – and it is hoped that the old city of the Red Sea port of Jeddah will soon join them.

However there is more at stake than a new interest in heritage or a desire to attract tourists as part of the kingdom’s bid to diversify its overwhelmingly oil-reliant economy. As elsewhere, controlling history is key to power. The House of al’Saud has only ever been able to rule its kingdom with the collaboration and support of the largely ultra-conservative clergy. Reforms can be pushed through – such as the introduction of women’s education, which provoked rioting in the towns of al-Qassem in the 1960s – but only with the consent of the majority of clerics.

For religious conservatives in the kingdom, any physical traces of history, even that of the first Muslims, is a distraction from God and raises the spectre of polytheism. So for many years, all traces of early worship within the kingdom, let alone of anything that might be deemed un-Islamic, have been destroyed. Scores of shrines, religious places, cemeteries and historical sites have been razed, damaged or built over. This is true even, indeed especially, in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

There is thus religious – and therefore political – resistance to preserving anything that is left.

Mammon as well as God plays a role in the new contest of the kingdom’s history. Most recently there has been a row between developers who hope to build apartments with a view of the grand mosque in Mecca – properties that would be worth astronomic sums – and local conservationists. This argument, like the broader conflict over "heritage", is not one that is going to be resolved soon. Its outcome – or rather its evolution – will be a fascinating window into a very conservative society that, for a variety of reasons, is still committed to expunging all traces of a poorer past.

"I would not like to live in the west," a bureaucrat says to me as we drive down the six-lane highway that passes for the central street of Riyadh, past vast new skyscrapers, rows of shopping malls and mile after mile of cement-fronted flats. "I have never been there but I look at life in Britain or France or America and I say the problem is that you have lost all your traditions."

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