Arabia Incognita: An invitation to Arabian Peninsula studies

Abstract

Between Africa and Asia lies a subcontinent that appears clearly on maps but only indistinctly in Western journalism and scholarship about the Middle East. Known to earlier orientalists and modern cinema fans as "Arabia," the land of sand and shrine, the Peninsula is nowadays often erroneously referred to as "the Gulf," the sea of oil. A vast land area is thereby reduced to a narrow slice of the Gulf coast, a rather curious place where according to most representations atavistic tribalism and Islamic conservativism thrive alongside ultramodern globalism. Only rarely do we step back to look at the whole of the Arabian Peninsula.