{"id":173340,"date":"2026-04-03T10:00:31","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T14:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=173340"},"modified":"2026-04-03T10:42:48","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T14:42:48","slug":"the-world-of-aramco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/04\/03\/the-world-of-aramco\/","title":{"rendered":"The World of Aramco"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Aramco World<\/em>, January\u2013February 1980 cover, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI had come to Poland to seek out the story of Count Rzewuski and other Polish adventurers who had traveled from the Ukrainian farmlands and Russian steppes south to the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula in their quest for the pure-bred Arabian horses that gave any cavalry an enormous military advantage,\u201d writes one high-spirited contributor to a 2001 issue of <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> the free magazine published by the U.S. subsidiary of the Saudi Arabian Oil Company. <\/span><\/p>\n

The article, which has no discernible news peg, explains how nineteenth-century Poles\u2014like Count Wac\u0142aw Rzewuski, a Warsaw aristocrat-turned-sheik, who disappeared in battle at age fifty-four\u2014contrived to bring Arabian horses to Eastern Europe. Following in the count\u2019s footsteps, the reporter, also a Saudi airline employee, meets Poland\u2019s state inspector of Arabian horse breeding, enumerates the most valuable Arabian mares to \u201cset hoof on Polish soil\u201d\u2014their names were Gazella, Mlecha, and Sahara\u2014and explains how the manuscript of the \u201ccount\u2019s account,\u201d <\/span>Sur les chevaux orientaux<\/span><\/i> et provenants des races orientales<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> can be viewed by special appointment in Warsaw.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s pretty standard fare for this defiant relic of midcentury publishing, which takes as its loose remit the entire Islamic world. Other articles in that issue cover Kashgar, a predominantly Muslim city in China, and mosque design in the United States (headline: \u201cImport, Adapt, Innovate\u201d). Less typical is the front-of-book<\/span> feature, a four-page photo spread of a patriotic candlelight vigil by Arab Americans in Brooklyn, five days after 9\/11. This was the magazine\u2019s first issue after the attacks, which changed everything for Muslims everywhere. \u201cI wanted to show people that we care, too,\u201d reads a quote from the thirteen-year-old Nasser Al-Subai, who had immigrated from Yemen four years prior. A later article on Arab musicians notes that a composer and <\/span>oud<\/span><\/i> virtuoso named Simon Shaheen had lost friends in the attacks ten days before playing a festival in Bloomington, Indiana, with what one local reviewer described as \u201cimmeasurable grace.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As with most of <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>\u2019s coverage, the spread studiously avoids overt political commentary. But the feature nonetheless broke with the frothing bipartisan Islamophobia that marked the post-9\/11 years\u2014the era of \u201cWHY THEY HATE US\u201d (the October 2001 <\/span>Newsweek<\/span><\/i> cover story, illustrated by a turbaned child with a rifle) and \u201cWHY THEY HATE EACH OTHER\u201d (a 2007 cover story in <\/span>Time<\/span><\/i>). <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>\u2019s insistence on the fullness of Arab American life, even immediately after 9\/11, captures the magazine\u2019s singular ethos. In 2009,<\/span> with the forever wars in full swing, the<\/span> editors noted somewhat euphemistically that \u201cinterest in Arab cultures and Islam soared after the horrors of 9\/11 and the wars that followed [and] Saudi <\/span>Aramco World <\/span><\/i>was no longer alone as an intercultural voice.\u201d I would say, rather, that it threw the magazine\u2019s utterly unique sensibility into stark relief. When I stumbled upon it some years later, I subscribed immediately.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aramco World <\/span><\/i>was launched in 1949, before the OPEC<\/small> crisis made Saudi Arabia very rich, \u201cas an in-house magazine,\u201d as the former editor William Tracy told<\/a> <\/span>Bidoun<\/span><\/i> in 2010, \u201ctalking about bowling and, you know, Wanda in accounting is getting married to Joe in engineering.\u201d Over the years, it evolved into a charming and slightly bizarre enclave of<\/span> print media, combining the recondite trivia of an almanac with the effortful style of the classical general-interest magazine, like<\/span> Life.<\/span><\/i> Now in its seventy-seventh year, the magazine is mailed out every two months from Texas. Its basic editorial approach, within its aforementioned domain of <\/span>dar al-Islam<\/span><\/i>, might be best summed up as: Isn\u2019t this cool?<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s doubtless strange that the wellspring of this warmly humanist project is a rapacious oil company, and that fact has not exactly been irrelevant to its output. The magazine was born from a corporate image crisis in the forties, when \u201cthe euphoria of the discovery of oil had been replaced by an increasing suspicion amongst the American public about the company\u2019s business practices,\u201d per a <\/span>dissertation<\/span><\/a> by Mariam Elnozahy on the magazine\u2019s early years. At Aramco\u2019s Dhahran compound, white American managers enjoyed many privileges denied to Arab workers, and labor strikes were frequent. In place of industrial conflict, the magazine\u2019s early photographs \u201cconjured a fantasy of oil,\u201d depicting \u201cjovial, smiling Arab and American workers on the rig.\u201d In 1955, the novelist Wallace Stegner was hired to write the company\u2019s history for the magazine, though his subsequent manuscript did not fulfill the company\u2019s public relations goals and was suppressed for over a decade. Subtle editorial pressures persisted: Tracy, who edited the magazine from 1967 to 1977, told <\/span>Bidoun <\/span><\/i>that, when selecting photographs for an article on a state dinner, they would consider which image showed fewer guests sipping wine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, the magazine\u2019s contributor guidelines welcome \u201ccoverage of any aspect of a cultural, scientific or historical nature that showcases cross-cultural connections within and beyond the Arab and Muslim world.\u201d But they pointedly do not cover \u201cpolitics, business news, religion, opinions,\u201d or \u201cconflict or controversy, even if they have positive outcomes.\u201d To wit, the magazine has not really covered Gaza since October 7. (Years earlier, an <\/span>Aramco World <\/span><\/i>reporter and <\/span>photographer admitted<\/a> to <\/span>Bidoun <\/span><\/i>that Palestine was among the \u201cthings that did not get talked about.\u201d) And yet, despite all these asterisks, <\/span>Aramco World <\/span><\/i>operates in a parallel universe from its corporate parent, evincing a life-affirming cosmopolitanism that many of its independently funded peers do not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps that\u2019s why, when I discovered<\/span> the magazine<\/span> during the pandemic, I felt like a homing pigeon returning to its cr\u00e8che. I\u2019ve been drawn to the Islamic world<\/span> my whole life. Perhaps subconsciously at first, because it seemed doubly other, and doubly compelling, to a child in a Hindu family in post-9\/11 America\u2014the Balkans-to-Bengal belt,<\/span> as the late Islamic scholar Shahab Ahmed put it, appearing like an irresistible, shimmering mass between the places I was \u201cfrom.\u201d I was absorbed in the stories of <\/span>One Thousand and One Nights<\/span><\/i>, Avicenna and Babur, the Ottoman harem, and, yes, Orientalist travelogues like <\/span>The Road to Oxiana<\/span><\/i>. Meanwhile, the War on Terror, like an experimental drug, seemed to miraculously extend the lifespans of legacy media just as they were receiving last rites. This troubled me\u2014not yet because of geopolitical savvy or even principled opposition, but because of simple cognitive dissonance.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 2010s, the public conversation around Islam descended further still, due in part to the specter of ISIS<\/small>, and I suppose it was around then that I realized I had to go to the places I\u2019d been trying to summon from texts. In 2016, I bought a one-way plane ticket to Jakarta, the capital of the world\u2019s largest Muslim-majority country. As a journalist there, I discovered anew how boring it was to instrumentalize a region under the rubrics of \u201csecurity\u201d and \u201cconflict.\u201d In Jakarta and beyond\u2014Sarajevo, Kano, Jeddah\u2014I drifted inexorably, unjournalistically, toward the interesting, surprising, and delightful: the speck-sized spice island that was traded for Manhattan, the Hausa translations of Ali Shariati that sold briskly in Nigeria.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These sideways discoveries are, as it happens, <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>\u2019s bread and butter. Its long-form features\u2014free to read in its digitized <\/span>archives<\/span><\/a>\u2014traverse such subjects as Tashkent\u2019s Soviet subway stations; Egyptian-style <\/span>mashrabiya <\/span><\/i>(wooden lattice screen) balconies in Peru; Gulf falconry; the iso-polyphony of Albanian folk music; the migration of camels; Muslim influences on American blues music; Arabic translations of superhero comics (\u201cIt\u2019s a Bird! It\u2019s a Plane! It\u2019s \u2026 Nabil Fawzi!\u201d). \u201c<\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i> really saw itself as a cultural interface between the Middle East and the United States,\u201d said Tracy. \u201cI think there was prescience in that, the idea that greater understanding \u2026 would be important in the future. Although I\u2019m not sure that worked out quite the way any of us expected.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The emphasis on intercultural exchange was a foundation that had been \u201csoundly laid\u201d from the outset, as the editors wrote in their fiftieth-anniversary issue. In the magazine\u2019s very first issue, Aramco\u2019s then-president W.F. Moore had written something like a mission statement:<\/span> \u201cWe wish to break down the walls of isolation so that our people here in America will be helped to see beyond their immediate surroundings.\u201d In the fifties, new Aramco hires took a six-week Arabic language course on Long Island before boarding the “Flying Camel\u201d or the “Flying Gazelle\u201d\u2014company aircraft\u2014to Dhahran. The initial logic for Aramco\u2019s in-house publication, in Tracy\u2019s retelling, was that employees would do better work with their Arab colleagues if they also knew, for instance, that Arabian horses came from Arabia, or if they were made to wonder, \u201cDid you know Arabs eat ice cream? And that they make it in Damascus?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

The Flying Camel by Saudi Aramco, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

The teachers of Aramco children soon asked for their own subscriptions, and the magazine \u201cworked up the scale until it was adults talking about adult things.\u201d In 1952 the newsletter became a magazine, published in New York, and in 1964 it moved to Beirut\u2014then a publishing mecca with a color printing press and copious freelance talent, per Tracy. They also brought on Paul Hoye, a former <\/span>Providence Journal <\/span><\/i>reporter finishing a Ford Foundation Fellowship in \u201cadvanced international reporting\u201d at Columbia. (His r\u00e9sum\u00e9 invariably evokes those \u201cvery best men\u201d who staffed so many Cold War outfits, cultural and otherwise.) He would edit the magazine until his death in 1986.<\/span><\/p>\n

As <\/span>Aramco World <\/span><\/i>became more outward-facing, aimed at readers not on payroll, management realized, per Tracy in the fiftieth-anniversary issue, that \u201cthe company\u2019s public reputation would, to some degree, be riding on the magazine.\u201d It was decided that every article \u201cwould be reviewed in Saudi Arabia by Aramco\u2019s Saudi experts, some of great reputation, before publication.\u201d It\u2019s unclear, from this inscrutable wording, whether that meant rubber-stamping, censorship, or something in between, but\u00a0 the editors concede that the practice \u201cgrated on Paul Hoye\u2019s newspaperman\u2019s instincts.\u201d As of 1999, \u201cknowledgeable readers in Dhahran\u201d still reviewed the magazine\u2019s texts. (<\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i> did not return a request for comment as to whether this practice was still in place.) The Lebanese Civil War forced the magazine\u2019s headquarters from Beirut to the Hague in 1975, and a decade later, when Hoye died, it moved again, to the petro-metropolis of Houston, where it remains.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As Aramco\u2019s expatriate workforce declined, the outlet evolved into what it is today: the obscure but friendly face of the world\u2019s largest oil company. The project\u2019s widening aperture can be seen, for instance, in the transition from a January 1953 cover story on \u201cBread: The World\u2019s Food,\u201d illustrated by a baker in the Aramco compound, to a September 1995 <\/span>article<\/span><\/a> following the \u201cflatbread trail\u201d from \u201cCentral Asia to West Asia; to Yemen, Egypt, and Syria; to the Kurdish areas of eastern Turkey, to Azerbaijan, and to Tunisia and Morocco.\u201d<\/span> Other issues bear the traces of a now-bygone Saudi-American project, like one from 1975, themed \u201cArabs in America,\u201d or another in 1986, when the Statue of Liberty turned a hundred and <\/span>Aramco World <\/span><\/i>decided, \u201clike many other publications \u2026 to mark the event with a special issue\u201d; their version entailed photographing Arab Americans in every U.S. state.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

From the January\u2013February 1980 issue of Aramco World<\/em>, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Public domain.<\/p><\/div>\n

But <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>\u2019s genius lies in its more gently gonzo offerings, which tend to be unconcerned with either Saudi Arabia or the United States. My <\/span>favorite article<\/span><\/a> recounts an epic journey to Uzbekistan to ascertain which of the region\u2019s famous varieties of melon may have been the ones mentioned by the fourteenth-century Tangerine explorer Ibn Battuta. <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i> has a breathtakingly catholic interpretation of what kinds of people, places, and things fall under its jurisdiction. “What would you have eaten in ninth-century Baghdad?\u201d is the premise of one quite typical 2006 <\/span>article<\/span><\/a>, which considers the oldest surviving Arabic cookbook,<\/span> Kitab al-Tabikh<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> (Though eggplant is now crowned as<\/span> sayyid al-khudaar<\/span><\/i>, the lord of vegetables, it was once a suspicious novelty from India, \u201cconsidered impossibly bitter,\u201d blamed by doctors for \u201ceverything from freckles and a hoarse throat to cancer and madness\u201d; nevertheless, writes Charles Perry, the <\/span>Kitab<\/span><\/i> contains seven eggplant recipes, \u201cprobably because a taste for eggplant first arose among the aristocracy.\u201d) A 2003 piece tracks an eighteenth-century silver coin called the Maria Theresa thaler from the Habsburg Empire into Africa and Arabia, where it survived in places like Oman as late as 1970. A 2010 feature narrates the experiences of Tichit women in Mauritania, who lead caravans while managing menstruation and pregnancy in the desert.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be the first to admit that <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>\u2019s golden age,<\/span> as captured in such perfectly delightful flights of inquiry, may have passed: the magazine rolled out the dread \u201cdigital-first strategy\u201d in 2023, and its seventy-fifth anniversary occasioned uninspiring headlines like \u201cThe Promises and Challenges of AI for Arabic.\u201d Recent issues on the website look markedly worse than those in the digitized archives. Nevertheless, gems still surface, and the website rewards digging. As good a reason to subscribe as any\u2014recall that it\u2019s free\u2014is that the first issue of the (Gregorian) year includes a themed, pull-out wall calendar; last year\u2019s was all about textiles, illustrating months with a horse blanket from Turkmenistan, a Pakistani carpet, a men\u2019s <\/span>ikat<\/span><\/i> head wrap from Indonesia, the inside of a wooly cape from Morocco\u2019s Atlas Mountains. The annotations on every month\u2019s grid take note of, variously, Rabindranath Tagore\u2019s birthday, an exhibition of Turkmen art in Rome, and Eid al-Adha, miniaturizing the magazine\u2019s argument that the world shaped by Islam is not a walled garden.<\/span><\/p>\n

Somewhat idiosyncratically, the pre-Islamic culture of now-Islamic regions is also fair game, leading to articles on subjects like Hammurabi\u2019s Code, \u201cAssyria to Iberia,\u201d and chess. Typical of the magazine\u2019s<\/span> kairos <\/span><\/i>is a 2021 cover story<\/a> on \u201c<\/span>The Quest for Blue<\/span>\u201d that forgoes Islamic art clich\u00e9s about image and ornamentation to recount the ingenuity of humanity\u2019s search for blue pigment, \u201cfrom Bronze Age Central Asia to early imperial China, from medieval Venice to the modern Maghrib.\u201d The breakthrough, recounted as breathlessly as if it happened at an auction last week, \u201ccame more than 5,000 years ago along the banks of the Nile when early Egyptian chemists first brought the color of the sky down to earth.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This willingness to look beyond, and sometimes before, Islam is not ahistorical kitsch, but a profound comment on how cultures actually accrete over time\u2014how they actually feel. It cuts equally against the literalist Salafi impulse to cast pre-Islamic history as the \u201cage of ignorance\u201d and the Western one to treat Islam as a hermetically sealed civilizational category. As Ahmed, the Pakistani Islamic scholar, wrote in his posthumous 2015 masterpiece, <\/span>What is Islam? <\/span><\/i>: \u201cIt is precisely this correspondence and coherence between <\/span>Islam as theoretical object<\/span><\/i> or analytical category and <\/span>Islam as real historical phenomenon<\/span><\/i> that is considerably and crucially lacking in the prevalent conceptualizations of the term \u2018Islam\/Islamic.\u2019 \u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Few people\u2019s encounters with the Islamic world feel like transgressing a civilizational threshold\u2014certainly not mine. If I had to reach for a primal image, like Bruce Chatwin\u2019s dinosaur hide, that set me off on later peregrinations, it might be the Taj Mahal, first seen at age seven through copious tears; I had expected a private viewing. Nevertheless it was immensely impressive. If you did not grow up with it, you never really get used to the dazzling geometry of Islamic architecture: the ivory dew-drop domes from a distance and the perfectly fitted <\/span>pietra dura<\/span><\/i> up close, the receding lines of the reflecting pool and consecutive symmetrical vistas framed by Mughal arches, the cool internal breeze defying the radiant heat of cow-belt India. Being not particularly in touch with the death drive, I was puzzled by the monument\u2019s macabre raison d\u2019\u00eatre, and upset that the woman for whom it was built never saw it. Still, an awesome sight like that can certainly knock you off course\u2014if not quite in a straight line, then to Indonesia, or Kosovo. In truth, my interest is not so much a quest to be completed as a sensibility reinforced over time\u2014the same one that animates much of <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>.<\/span> Naturally, the magazine has covered the Taj (high Aramcore) several times, from a 1968 paean to the \u201cgem of gems\u2019\u201d architecture to a 2024 essay on its artistic depictions during the Raj.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite its aggressively light, even lightweight, approach, <\/span>Aramco World <\/span><\/i>has a higher purpose, I think, in a time when Muslim lives and societies are still routinely treated with indifference,\u00a0 hysteria, or cruelty. Perhaps the magazine\u2019s charms also include blunting the literary disappointment of what Amitav Ghosh <\/span>called<\/span><\/a> the \u201cOil Encounter\u201d between the U.S. and the Middle East. \u201cTo a great many Americans,\u201d he observed, oil \u201creeks of unavoidable overseas entanglements, a worrisome foreign dependency, economic uncertainty, risky and expensive military enterprises; of thousands of dead civilians and children and all the troublesome questions that lie buried in their graves.\u201d By the time it enters the realm of fiction, it has \u201cmore than just a whiff of that deep suspicion of the Arab and Muslim worlds that wafts through so much of American intellectual life \u2026 it becomes a Problem that can be written about only in the language of Solutions.\u201d Gently but consistently resisting this language of problems is what elevates the project of <\/span>Aramco World<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> the Oil Encounter\u2019s unlikeliest child.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Krithika Varagur\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Call: Inside the Global Saudi Religious Project\u00a0and an editor of\u00a0<\/em>The Drift\u00a0and <\/em>Equator.<\/main><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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