In their fundamental composition, cultural identity, and inherited traditions, the Arabs are an “oral” rather than a “written” people. They are fascinated by poetry, captivated by eloquence, and moved by expression.
They celebrate the spoken word and use it to paint a vivid picture of their life, environment, values, and ethics. Their poems, proverbs, stories, and even genealogies and chronicles of historical periods were transmitted orally.
The chain of transmission and the attribution of narrators in major works of early Islamic movements, biographies, and histories, along with the recognition of Qur’anic recitations and narratives of prophetic tradition, remain living evidence of the centrality of oral tradition in Arab culture.
This continues despite the expansion of Arab intellectual horizons and the development of methods of documentation and writing across art, science, and literature.
National memory as a source of legitimacy
States are based not only on territory and authority, but also on shared narratives that give them meaning and continuity.
Saudi Arabia’s oral memory has contributed to shaping the national narrative, reinforcing the image of a post-turmoil state of law and justice, confirming symbols of unity, and transmitting values of loyalty and unity across generations.
However, modern states cannot confine such narratives to traditional social spheres. It can be turned into institutional symbolic capital that is managed and deployed within national projects. This is where the transition from preservation to vision begins.
In times of transformation, national identity faces new challenges, especially amidst rapid economic and social change. National vision is about more than just building an economy. They redefine citizenship and belonging.
The challenge is therefore not just to protect oral stories, but to revitalize them, moving from simply preserving them to rereading, interpreting, integrating them into education, transforming them into interactive digital content, and linking local memories to narratives of national unity.
In this way, memory becomes a driver of identity rather than nostalgia for the past.
Clarification of terminology
Before proceeding, it is necessary to clarify three terms associated with “oral” history.
1. Oral Heritage: Materials such as stories, proverbs, poems, tales, songs, chants, and myths that have been passed down from generation to generation through oral communication, speech, narration, and performance.
2. Oral stories: sources of history transmitted directly from eyewitnesses and contemporaries to posterity.
3. Oral History: A modern term and a discipline within history. It refers to a scientific method carried out by professional bodies to document the oral testimony of individuals who witnessed historical events according to established standards and through audio and videotaped interviews, which are subject to review and scrutiny.
Oral explanation and documentation
Oral stories form the basis of historical documents. As the discipline of history has developed, history has come to complement written sources. It clarifies aspects of a particular era, explains specific events, and dispels ambiguity. It also reflects social behavior, values, and characteristics.
These stories include personal memories and community stories about everyday life, livelihoods, and social relations. These describe occupations, crafts, and practices spanning fields such as agriculture, trade, pastoralism, and education, among others.
While official history and written records focus primarily on political and military developments, oral narratives appear as oral histories centered on customs, traditions, and social, economic, and cultural issues.
It delves into details about food, clothing, medical treatments, art and play, nightly conversations, travelogues, love and life, and suffering, disease, and death. It conveys feelings and thoughts that may appear only partially in records, personal memoirs, and personal documents.
Interest in oral traditions in general and oral stories in particular is not a recent phenomenon among Arabs.
They were the pioneers who established the basis for collecting and documenting oral materials by compiling the prophetic traditions according to precise principles and standards.
Dr. Abdullah Al Askar pointed out that Muslim scholars codified scientific rules on the use of oral testimonies, which subsequently developed into independent fields such as the science of transmission chains, biographical evaluation, criticism and verification, and hadith methodology.
Regarding literary and oral heritage, including poems and reports, Dr. Omar Al-Saif said that as concerns about the loss of oral poetic heritage grew, systematic efforts were launched to collect, classify and document oral poetic heritage before conducting analysis and research.
Narrators established strict criteria for collecting pure Arabic from tribes considered linguistically uncontaminated and defined chronological parameters for acceptable evidence. The transfer of oral materials to written form has given them a degree of recognition that modern oral heritage often lacks.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, much of its oral heritage remains undocumented, making it a treasure trove of history that remains underexplored.
Saudi historian methodology
Saudi history, in its multiple strands and channels, extends into broader Arab and Islamic history.
Oral stories have been a trusted source of information for Saudi historians since the creation of the first Saudi state three centuries ago. They received such reports through various means and adopted different methodologies.
In his research, Dr. Abdul Latif Al Homayd investigated the methods of 18 historians from the founding of the Saudi state to the era of King Abdulaziz, and classified them into three schools of thought.
The first group, which included Ibn Bishr, Mohammed al-Obaid, Abdulrahman bin Nasser, al-Jilikli, and Mohammed al-Aqili, applied a rigorous methodology. They received testimonies from witnesses and their callers, verified their reliability, and identified the narrator, location, and circumstances.
The second largest group, including Ibn Ghannam, al-Bassam, Ibn Issa, al-Rihani, Muqbil al-Duhail, Khalid al-Faraj, Hafez Wahba, Saud bin Haslul, Ahmed Attar, and Mohammed al-Abd al-Kader, referred to oral testimony as a source of information, but did not systematically document their methodology.
The third and smallest group, which included Ibn Abbad, al-Fakiri, and Ibn Duyan, did not cite oral sources or explain their documentation methods.
During the establishment of the Saudi state, accounts of anarchy and injustice prior to unification and subsequent transformation were preserved in the collective memory.
Similar stories circulated in the period before King Abdulaziz consolidated his rule. The dictations also describe aspects of daily life and the roles of prominent family and tribal figures.
Traditional gatherings served as platforms for history, where news was exchanged, poems were recited, and stories were told according to established norms and customs.
Women also played a central role, not only as administrators but also as narrators of detailed social histories passed down through the generations from their grandmothers, a practice that continues today.
Poems, sayings, and proverbs serve as a repository of history, summarizing events into poems and sayings. These were among the ships that kept accounts that were not listed in official records.
Reliability, bias, and selective memory
Oral narratives do not reproduce events exactly as they happened. It reshapes them through time, the narrator’s consciousness, and collective identity. It should not be treated as an established fact, but should be critically examined through three dimensions.
Reliability: Memory evolves over time and is influenced by repetition and context. The solution is not exclusion, but comparison with other accounts and available documentation.
Prejudice: Narrators may speak from a social or political standpoint, glorifying or justifying a group’s role. Stories reveal not only events but also points of view.
Selectivity: Societies may preserve what serves their story and omit destructive elements. Sometimes silence itself has meaning.
Al-Askar emphasized the importance of considering motivations, mode of communication, and narrative structure before incorporating oral testimony into historical documents.
Efforts to document oral heritage
Since the establishment of the Saudi state, oral narratives have been documented through the efforts of individuals and organizations. The media conducted interviews across a variety of sectors, while the General Chairman of Youth Welfare documented aspects of the oral heritage of the 1980s during his supervision of culture and the arts.
Among his individual efforts, Dr. Saad al-Sowayan established a project between 1983 and 1990 to document hundreds of hours of records of Bedouin life, including history, poetry, genealogy, and tribal traces, and to collect Nabati poetry from oral sources.
Author and cultural figure Abdul Maqsood Khoja paid tribute to over 500 scholars, thinkers and writers through his book Al-Isnainiyah (1982-2015). These sessions documented their biographies and experiences, later published in more than 30 books, and contributed thousands of pages of oral testimony to the national memory.
Oral history as a discipline
As a modern academic discipline, oral history focuses on contemporary history. The following institutions are active in this field:
The Hajj Research Center at King Abdulaziz University recorded interviews with pilgrim service providers in the 1970s to document the history of their profession.
While overseeing the Janadriya National Heritage and Cultural Festival, the Ministry of National Security recorded interviews with men who accompanied King Abdulaziz in the 1980s and 1990s, documenting aspects of the founder’s life. These recordings were later transferred to the King Abdulaziz Foundation.
The King Fahd National Library launched the Oral Documentation Project in 1994 and recorded over 350 interviews with intellectuals and community figures, which remain unpublished.
Government departments such as the Department of Education and the Department of Transport recorded testimonies prior to the 1999 centenary celebrations and used them in commemorative publications.
The King Khalid Foundation has documented the testimonies of approximately 100 princes, ministers, and officials about King Khalid’s life and published them in a dedicated database.
The King Abdulaziz Foundation established the first specialized oral history center in 1995 under the leadership of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. Drawing on the experience of the University of California, Los Angeles, we developed scientific standards and recorded approximately 8,000 interviews covering various aspects of Saudi history.
These efforts have strengthened oral narratives as a primary and complementary source of information to written texts.
Aiming for a national digital archive
If oral memory preserved the stories of unity and transmitted its values, the challenge today is not only to collect the stories, but to manage them within a unified national digital archive, governed by consistent criteria of registration and classification.
Such archives link stories to detailed metadata, ensure digital accessibility while protecting privacy and rights, and employ digital analytics and artificial intelligence tools to extract patterns and meaning.
The “People of King Abdulaziz” project, launched in collaboration with the King Abdulaziz Foundation and the Ministry of National Security during the first Oral History Forum in December 2025, underlines the momentum in this direction.
The institutional governance of oral archives will transform memories from accumulated information into knowledge systems that serve national identity, support research, and build balanced narratives that reflect diversity.
In the digital age, memory is not just a preservation of the past, but a strategic pillar of national knowledge management.
