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Saving Folk Culture
Ruwaat or the Storytelling tradition has remained dominant outside most population centres in Saudi Arabia even today.
A new project in Saudi Arabia aims to preserve the Kingdom’s disappearing folk culture. The project leader, Fahd al-Semmari, arrived in the northern region of al-Jouf last month. The remote province, about 1,200 km from the capital, Riyadh, is one of the 13 governorates included in a national project to document folk tales, songs and poems before the ravages of modernisation wipe them out forever.
But independent academics are cynical about the programme, which they say has come too late. Storytelling tradition has remained dominant outside most population centres in Saudi Arabia despite the written culture that followed the advent of Islam. “We need projects like these to stop the erosion of the memory of a country,” said Fahd al-Semmari. “In this part of the world, not that much is written in history. In al-Jouf you find all kinds of people who are gifted in memory and telling stories.These ‘ruwaat’, or storytellers are few, but they are important. Their memories are strong. Everybody knows them because they are the life of any gathering, but they are decreasing heavily,” he added. The richest mine of information is to be found in al-Jouf and nearby Ha’il, and the distant mountains of Jazan, which border Yemen. More than 3,200 individual histories had been gathered so far. The information collected is being written, recorded and deposited in a specially-established documentation centre in Riyadh, the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives.
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