NEW ENCYCLOPAEDIA FUNDED BY PRINCE SULTAN IBN ABDUL AZIZ

		February 17, 1999

NEW ENCYCLOPAEDIA FUNDED BY PRINCE SULTAN IBN ABDUL AZIZ.
RESEARCH INTO THE BIOGRAPHY OF KING ABDUL AZIZ IN FOREIGN DOCUMENTS.

A new encyclopaedia is going to deal with the period of the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its unification. The new encyclopaedia which is issued by Dar al-Daira Publishing House in Riyadh is called "King Abdul Aziz Al Saud: His Biography and His Reign in Foreign Documents." In this encyclopaedia, which has been funded by Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud Second Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence and Aviation and Inspector General, there will be summaries in Arabic of the British, French and American documents which covered the period from 1902 to 1953. It is expected that this encyclopaedia will fulfil many of the requirements of researchers in various historical fields related to the first half of this century.

Three years ago the International Arab Encyclopaedia was published, with special funding from Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz. This was the first attempt of its kind in the Arab world to produce a major comprehensive international encyclopaedia in the tradition of the great international encyclopaedias directed towards the general public.

In a matter of months from now an enormous scientific and documentational work will be published whose printing and production and publication has been funded by Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz. It is called "King Abdul Aziz Al Saud: His Biography and His Reign in Foreign Documents" and just as the financial revenues from earlier projects went to the Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz Al Saud Charity Foundation, so will the financial revenues from the new project be given by the Prince to the organisation.

The publisher of this work and its supervisor is the Dar al-Daira for Publishing and Documentation and this work which is pending publication is its first project to see the light in the form of 20 volumes. Preparation for the work has taken more than seven years and the company has been working since before the start of the second Gulf War on preparing another enormous scientific project which will be its second publication. This project is the Comprehensive Encyclopaedia of the Traditional Culture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia which will be published in 15 volumes.

The documentary encyclopaedia called "King Abdul Aziz Al Saud: His Biography and His Reign in Foreign Documents" seeks to offer summaries in Arabic of the British, French and American documents which pertain to the life of King Abdul Aziz Al Saud and the history of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during his reign (1902-1953). These summaries will offer scholars and those interested in research a lot of information about these documents. Researchers into the history of Saudi Arabia suffer from a paucity of documentation about this area, especially with documents pertaining to the beginning of the period of the establishment of the kingdom when King Abdul Aziz and his men were pre-occupied with the wars of unification rather than building the states' institutions. It was a time when education was still in its early stages, written documentation was not common and records were non-existent. Most of the documentation that is available from this early period comes from foreign sources which many researchers will not be able to benefit from fully either because of the language barrier or because the documents are only found in far away places which are difficult to get to. This project was set up in order to meet this need as is said in the introduction of the encyclopaedia which runs to around 100 pages.

The introduction explains that the decision was taken to include summaries, and not the complete translations, of the documents. The publishers decided that including translations would not obviate the need to consult the original documentation because of the possibility of a lack of precision in the translation which could lead to certain features of the original text being lost. The goal is to guide the researcher and reader to the record which concerns him by giving him a clear idea as to its contents and enough information as to how the document can be reached.

The introduction also explains that the choice fell on the British and French documents because of the history of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and those two powers which had had an extensive presence in the region from an early period. As for the American documents, their importance comes from the interests of the United States of America in the region after oil was discovered and the role it played after that in the infrastructure projects in Saudi Arabia. In spite of their importance, other documents which can be found in the Italian and German archives and the archives of the Grande Porte and Vizierate in Istanbul, have been left out because working on them as well as on the British, French and American documents would have been an enormous undertaking. The supervisors of the encyclopaedia feared the task would go beyond their capacity and capability and might hinder the work and perhaps even cause it to be abandoned altogether. This is why they postponed looking into these archives until later, hoping that the experience they have gained in dealing with the British, French and American documents would be a starting point for dealing with the documents of other archives which are more difficult and more complex.

This project as introduced by its originators has a different starting point to the principles which are used by archives in the classification of documents.

This is why, from the very beginning, they have examined files which they have received and categorised the documents they contain and they have discarded those documents which have no bearing on the period covered by the project. It became clear to them that the method followed by most archives in the classification of documents often leads to having several copies of a single document in different files and catalogued under different numbers. This means that in any single case they might have found that an individual document which contained several appendices in several different files and would stored under different numbers and would also be found to exist among the appendices of other documents. This meant that, had they remained true to the method of classification which is followed by the archives, they would have fallen into several problems, the most important of which would perhaps be that the same document would be summarised more than once. On the other hand, dealing with the appendices as if they were sections of a single document which are different to it in date might cause certain important documents to be removed from their original historical context. This is why one of the most important difficulties which faced them was to determine a practical and procedural definition for each document and to come up with criteria for classification which they would rely on and to which they would stay true to throughout their work. One of the most important operations which they had to undertake with these measures was an operation which they agreed to call the "fragmentation of the documents". This operation is represented by separating the appendices from the original documents and treating them as independent documents. After the fragmentation operation they would reclassify the fragmented documents, discard anything that is repetitive and anything that is not required. Then they would classify the documents left over historically and organise them according to date. It was only then that the documents would be ready to be summarised. In cases where there were two texts of a document which were different, and one of those texts was found to have been more complete than another, the decision was always taken to choose the more complete text and consider the other version a repetition which would simply be referred to.

One of the cases where there is repetition is the existence of the original of a letter in one file and a copy of it in another file. In this case the difference would be that the original would have a signature whereas the copy would only refer to the signature. In other cases, however, there may have been a simple note written by the recipient of the document or the recipient of a copy of the document or a comment which was written afterwards. They divided the summary of the document into four principle sections which are: al-tarwisa (title), al-isnad (attribution), al-matn (body of text) and al- dhayl (addenda).

The documents which were summarised fulfil the needs of researchers and readers of different interests. Perhaps the most important matter to interest researchers in the contemporary history of Saudi Arabia is to follow the stages of its unification and the efforts made by King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud to achieve that. There is another group of researchers who might be interested in the development of the constitutional and legislative aspects as well as the administrative divisions that Saudi Arabia experienced during the various periods of King Abdul Aziz's reign. There are other researchers who will be interested in following the appearance and development of the institutions on which the state was built. There will be those who will be interested in the development of the military and security apparatus and the beginnings of the establishment of Saudi armed forces and the central police force, taking into account the various organisational and reforming attempts made in these two sectors.

The researcher who wants to follow the stages of economic development of Saudi Arabia would be interested to know that its economy had been established for some time before the discovery of the oil wealth. Some researchers would concentrate on the field of oil and mining concessions and their direct effect in bringing about qualitative changes in the economy of Saudi Arabia. Some may wish to follow the emergence of the infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, such as roads, electric power, the water network, ports and airports, and the development of the industrial, trade and agricultural sectors.

Others may concentrate on the rates of currency exchange and the beginnings of the Saudi riyal and the establishment of the Saudi monetary fund and the repercussions of the currency policy of Saudi Arabia and the history of the Saudi national purse and financial organisations.

Some scholars will be interested in the social dimension, the demographic make-up of Saudi society and the population censuses.

There will be others who will be interested in discovering the names of tribes and their clans and branches, their sheikhs, where they lived, their sources of income, the land on which they grazed, and their distribution on the map of Saudi Arabia. Some may seek to monitor the various social phenomena such as smoking or the introduction of the radio. Others will perhaps be interested in following up the issue of slavery and the way in which King Abdul Aziz dealt with this phenomenon. Some researchers will be interested in the history of social services for the needy, the handicapped and disabled in Saudi Arabia and their relations to the Islamic foundations. Others will be concerned with bringing out the history of health affairs, the development of health services and organisations and their fundamental human and technical structures.

One of the consequences of the geographic expansion of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was that the custodianship of the two holy mosques came under the responsibility of the government, which made religious affairs an indispensable area to many researchers. Indeed it would be impossible to study the history of Saudi Arabia without pondering at the phenomenon of the Pilgrimage and the reaction of the Islamic world to the setting up of the Saudi state, and King Abdul Aziz's leadership of it, and the spread of his sovereignty over the lands where the sacred places of Islam are to be found.