Aramco World was launched in 1949, before the OPEC crisis made Saudi Arabia very rich, “as an in-house magazine,” as the former editor William Tracy told Bidoun in 2010, “talking about bowling and, you know, Wanda in accounting is getting married to Joe in engineering.” Over the years, it evolved into a charming and slightly bizarre enclave of print media, combining the recondite trivia of an almanac with the effortful style of the classical general-interest magazine, like Life. 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 dar al-Islam, might be best summed up as: Isn’t this cool?
It’s 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 The magazine was born from a corporate image crisis in the forties, when “the euphoria of the discovery of oil had been replaced by an increasing suspicion amongst the American public about the company’s business practices,” per a dissertation by Mariam Elnozahy on the magazine’s early years. At Aramco’s Dhahran compound, white American managers enjoyed many privileges denied to Arab workers, and labor strikes were frequent. In place of industrial conflict, the magazine’s early photographs “conjured a fantasy of oil,” depicting “jovial, smiling Arab and American workers on the rig.” In 1955, the novelist Wallace Stegner was hired to write the company’s history for the magazine, though his subsequent manuscript did not fulfill the company’s public relations goals and was suppressed for over a decade. Subtle editorial pressures persisted: Tracy, who edited the magazine from 1967 to 1977, told Bidoun that, when selecting photographs for an article on a state dinner, they would consider which image showed fewer guests sipping wine.
Today, the magazine’s contributor guidelines welcome “coverage of any aspect of a cultural, scientific or historical nature that showcases cross-cultural connections within and beyond the Arab and Muslim world.” But they pointedly do not cover “politics, business news, religion, opinions,” or “conflict or controversy, even if they have positive outcomes.” To wit, the magazine has not really covered Gaza since October 7. (Years earlier, an Aramco World reporter and photographer admitted to Bidoun that Palestine was among the “things that did not get talked about.”) And yet, despite all these asterisks, Aramco World operates in a parallel universe from its corporate parent, evincing a life-affirming cosmopolitanism that many of its independently funded peers do not.