Fellow Highlight | Omer Shah

Biography

Omer Shah is currently a teaching fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He finished his doctorate there in June of 2021. His dissertation project is entitled, 'Made in Mecca: Expertise, Smart Technology, and Hospitality in the Post-Oil Holy City." In it, he examines an emerging world of crowd scientists, engineers, and other “hajj entrepreneurs” and “experts” making new smart technologies of mass pilgrim management, logistics, and surveillance. He has a MA from the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. Omer received his BA in Anthropology from Bard College. 

Interview

Question: Please describe your work.
Answer: The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is in the midst of an ambitious plan to reengineer social and economic life in the kingdom. This national transformation plan, known as Vision 2030, seeks to prepare the kingdom for a post-oil future. This has involved a movement from oil as a “natural resource” to a new idea of “human resources.” It demands al-saʿwadah or Saudization of various industries and sectors. Saudi citizens are to become the vanguard of a knowledge economy in the kingdom, one driven by new knowledges and smart technologies. What is often ignored in discussions of Vision 2030 is a more regional transformation happening around the holy city and its attendant pilgrimage systems—hajj and ʿumrah. By 2030, Saudi Arabia is planning to increase the number of annual pilgrims from eight million to thirty million. 

And so, if oil has certain limits, hajj is framed as lasting “forever.” The holy city must now be made productive in new ways, defined by new logics of speed and intensity. The once seasonal nature of Mecca’s crowds will now be a permanent fixture of the holy city. Thus, for Mecca to bear this new burden, the city must be remade by new digital and smart technologies, new kinds of technical expertise, but also an increasingly normative idea of hospitality. A religious service-economy is offered as a supplement to the knowledge economy. Thus, this exuberant claim of “forever” belies a total transformation of ideas of labor, knowledge, and hospitality in order for Mecca and its crowds to be turned into a resource for a national economy. 

My dissertation, Made in Mecca: Expertise, Smart Technology and Hospitality in the Post-Oil Holy City, examines this emerging world of crowd scientists, engineers, and other “hajj entrepreneurs” and “experts” making these new smart technologies of mass pilgrim management, logistics, and surveillance. I show how these new forms of expertise must engage, albeit with certain tension, older, and decidedly more Islamic ways of knowing and managing the hajj. I analyze how Mecca’s cosmopolitan logics and histories are dulled even as pilgrimage is to be intensified— where the rigor of belonging is traded for the intensity of movement and industry. 

In these communities of knowledge production that I write about, cybernetics and logistics bristle up against the shari’a. And so, my research calls for a reconsideration of intellectual projects considered disparate, namely what gets labelled the anthropology of Islam and studies of media, technology, and infrastructure. In working with these different grammars of hajj expertise, I am interested in how “the crowd,” the holy city or sanctuary, and its ritual are conceptualized in this new age of calculative reason. I focus on the technical, intellectual and ethical life-worlds of these hajj knowledge workers and experts and their uneven arrangement in this new-old world.

Q: How and when did you become interested in this field? 
A: I performed the hajj when I was in college and ever since then I’ve maintained an intellectual relationship with Mecca and its management. My undergraduate thesis examined the hajj from the perspective of a North American tour group. But then many years later as a master’s student I wanted to write about the bureaucratic structures of the Palestinian hajj mission and its operations through various legal, administrative, and political regimes.  However, while doing research for my master’s, I realized that while a social science literature on the hajj was limited. There was an emerging and highly technical literature from computer sciences, engineering, and urban planning much of which dealt with the problem of “the crowd” in Mecca. Some of this literature was written by foreign experts, but there was also a great number of Saudis working on questions of crowd and traffic management. It is from this observation that the project really took off. 

Q: Has, and if so, how, has the COVID-19 affected/changed your work? 
A: Luckily, I did the bulk of my research between 2017-2019. However, it was a deeply strange experience to write this dissertation about “the crowd” and its intensification in and through forms of lockdown and quarantine. Yet at the same time, I was also able to see how these schemes of crowd and queue management would become increasingly important in the choreography of everyday life whether in Brooklyn, NY or in Mecca. 

Q: What are your plans for the future?  
A: I am teaching this year in the Department of Anthropology as a postdoctoral fellow. In the fall, I taught a seminar on the politics of management consulting. The course emerged in and around a concern of the so-called “Ministry of McKinsey” that governs a place like Saudi Arabia. But I was also interested in a sometimes-uncomfortable professional proximity of the consultant to the figure of the anthropologist. I am currently teaching a lecture course on the art of fieldwork called “The Ethnographic Imagination.”

I’ve also been thinking about how I want to transform my dissertation into a book project. While my dissertation was tightly organized around my ethnographic research in Jeddah and Mecca, the book manuscript will be much larger in scope, taking more seriously the export function of the Saudi government’s experiments in the holy city. In this book project, I will more forcefully argue for Mecca and, by extension, religion’s entanglement with knowledges and technologies of optimization, management, and logistics.