Saudi’s biggest
cultural festival
The Janadriyah festival attracts millions every year
WORDS | ALEX RAYNER
PHOTOGRAPHY | TIM WHITE
A BRIGHT-EYED ARABIAN YOUTH DANCES UP TO US AND STARES US DOWN. Wearing a traditional Saudi thobe (an ankle-length robe) and posing briefly for Voyager’s camera, he sets himself apart from the throng within this desert compound by throwing a few showy Sufi-esque shapes.
“Welcome to my culture,” he shouts proudly, over the din of the drums and pipes, and then flounces off with his compatriots.
Welcome, indeed, to Janadriyah. Some describe it as a Saudi fête while others see it as a recreation of the peninsula’s Bedouin heritage. More highbrow, devout visitors laud its talks and lectures as key sources of dialogue within the Islamic world.
Older visitors are reminded of a fast-disappearing Arabian past that they can experience again here and aimless teenagers welcome Janadriyah as a place to – if not exactly party – then certainly a place to appreciate one’s national heritage, while goofing off a little too. Not that you can go too far: the event has separate male and female days for visitors to ensure the country’s moral laws are enforced.
For the uninitiated, the two-week long National Heritage and Folk Culture Festival (as Janadriyah is known officially) put on by the National Guard in the Janadriyah model village, off the Dammam road, about 45 kilometres outside Riyadh near the King’s Ranch – opposite the BAE Systems residential compound – sums up Saudi culture in all its enigmatic charm and oddity.
From the road, this towering, duncoloured, one and a half kilometre square settlement looks as if it dates from the reign of Saladin. Yet both the buildings and the festival celebrate their quarter-century anniversary this year.
While camels would have ruled the roads during the era Janadriyah seeks to evoke, latter-day visitors may park up pretty much anywhere within walking distance of the site; the scrubland out here is plentiful and fine for off-roading. A good few square kilometres are covered with lines of visitors’ Fords, Toyotas and Chevvys. Entering the town’s walls is easy: the event is free, royally endorsed, and well attended by both foreign visitors and all sections of Saudi citizenry.
Inside the fortifications, the tone is equal parts Poundbury and Glastonbury. But Janadriyah’s genesis is, at heart, conservative.
As the National Guard Deputy for Education and Cultural Affairs, Dr Abdulrahman al-Subait, announced back in 1985: “Rapid developments in the kingdom during the past 15 to 20 years mean that youths now in their twenties may not know how their fathers lived.”
Oil wealth, while enriching and modernising the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, eroded the country’s ancient traditions and cultures. The ideas of heritage and architectural preservation were novel in a country that, until recently, hadn’t needed to preserve its ways of life. During the 1970s, venerable old buildings were allowed to rot while luxurious new dwellings were erected, and a new leisure class were free to abandon old skilled trades and farming practices.
In an attempt to redress this, the House of Saud engaged its National Guard, who are charged with protecting the king and the mosques of Mecca and Medina. Together they dreamt up the festival, initially as a one-off event to be held for five days in a specially commissioned mud fort. Such was the success of the 1985 festival, matched with the authorities’ keeness to preserve Saudi culture, that the event was extended by a full week and became an annual event immediately thereafter.
Nowadays, the single fort has expanded to include dedicated gastronomic, folk craft and agricultural sections, a performance arena and a bustling souk. Attendance has swelled from a few thousand to around three million throughout the course of the event, placing Janadriyah’s crowds on a par with London’s Notting Hill Carnival.
Within a decade, Janadriyah was not just a national event; it also served as an international showcase for Islamic culture. King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz is often accompanied by fellow Gulf dignitaries at the event’s opening ceremony.
The festival’s salon-ish aspirations have grown from evening poetry recitals in the early days through to world-class political debates. Janadriyah regularly attracts hundreds of renowned writers and academics. In 1996, the American academic Samuel Huntington spoke at the festival, defending his famous, and in Arabian quarters, infamous, work, The Clash of Civilizations. If reports are to be believed, he wasn’t given an easy ride.
Yet, despite these modern developments, the more charming aspects of Janadriyah lie in its traditional elements. The festival begins with a camel race and there are always sword displays. The food stalls are busy and the hawk handlers attract quite a bit of attention. On ladies days, henna and make-up specialists take pride of place.
Hardy gents, meanwhile, gather around the festival’s sawani, a camel-drawn irrigation system: the animal pulls a wheel-mounted bucket from a well deep below the ground. It’s a big attraction not only because it’s a faithful recreation of a mainstay of Saudi agriculture, but also because its nifty desert ingenuity brings to mind both TE Lawrence and W Heath Robinson.
Then there’s the traditional Islamic school, which takes pride of place in another corner of the festival. Yet rather than revel in stern pedagogy, the festival-goers delight in the theatrically disobedient schoolboys and their draconian master.
There are also plenty of stalls to browse, trinkets to buy – everything from pottery through to soft drinks – and insights to be had.
We leave Janadriyah far more sober and less saddle-sore than I remembering being from similar Western festivals. Yet in terms of cultural insight Janadriyah is certainly on a par with its more wanton counterparts.
The National Heritage and Folk Culture Festival runs 12 to 26 February at Janadriyah, Riyadh
