​​​​​​​The ACRPS Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit welcomed Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait, Tareq Alrabei, for the second in its lecture series for the 2025-2026 academic year. Held on the evening of Monday 19 January 2026, the lecture, titled “From the Sons of Ibn Majid to the Sons of Sinbad: Local Maritime Knowledge in the Gulf and Its Ideological Contexts”, was introduced by the Unit’s affiliated researcher Abdulrahman Albaker.

Alrabei began by explaining that that the project has two layers. The first is “local knowledge”, which encompasses everything related to maritime life, including documents, poems, and practices. The second is “nationalist discourse” and the processes through which it absorbs and co-opts local knowledge.

Alrabei discussed Kuwait’s efforts, since the late 1950s, to establish a foothold within Arab knowledge production, which manifested culturally. Paradoxically, they coincided with the decline of maritime life: pearl markets stagnated, the last sailing voyage was recorded at that very moment in the late 1950s, and Kuwait took a sharp turn from East to West. Alrabei noted that one of the central questions of his research project is how nationalist thought dealt with local knowledge as embodied in maritime life. The Arab nationalist project triggered a complete rupture with local maritime knowledge, which was only invoked when it intersected with the grand nationalist narrative. He provided evidence for this from a number of Kuwaiti publications with a nationalist orientation from that period, which paid insufficient attention to older architectural and cultural practices, focusing instead on images of progress, modern urban development, oil, and other aspects of modernity that sought to highlight Kuwait’s “civilized face”. There was an epistemic rupture in which oil replaced the sea, as the latter – within the perceptions of nationalist thought – was deemed incompatible with nationalist discourse.

Alrabei then turned to local maritime knowledge, beginning with rahmaniyyat (navigation manuals) – documents in which the ship’s captain records everything related to the art of navigation. The rahmaniyyat did not rely solely on the personal experiences of captains, but also drew on older Arabic navigational texts dating back to the 15th century, authored by prominent Arab seafarers such as Ahmad ibn Majid (d. 906 AH/1501 CE), Sulayman al-Mahri (d. 961 AH/1554 CE), and others. The language of the rahmaniyyat can be described as an exemplary embodiment of the language of the sea: neither strictly classical nor purely colloquial, instead oscillating between the two and striving for eloquence.

He also focused on the roznamas, daily logs in which the captain records the course of the voyage and its details from beginning to end. These logs are among the most important sources of the language of seafarers and for interpreting maritime knowledge, as they constitute a vast repository of maritime vocabulary relating to weather conditions, ship movement, and other matters. He pointed to several research efforts that have produced numerous dictionaries compiling the language of seafarers.

Alrabei also discussed the emergence of the term “local” or “vernacular” within Indian Ocean studies as a classification denoting a distinct level of epistemic analysis. This perspective holds that any attempt to understand the historical and intellectual development of the Indian Ocean must begin with local narratives in the region rather than relying on colonial documents. Postcolonial studies argue that maritime knowledge has been neglected. Alrabei further emphasized the risks facing research into local knowledge, including the embedded ideology present in the work of some researchers in this field, as well as excessive nostalgia, which can lead to conceptual confusion.

Finally, Alrabei turned to how nationalist discourse conveyed the sea, drawing on a case study of the Kuwaiti poet Mohammed Al-Fayez (1938-1991), who is regarded as one of the most prominent modernist poets in the Gulf region. He argued that Al-Fayez was able to portray the sea through a modern nationalist consciousness and to adapt local knowledge, even though he had never been to sea himself, having lived a bureaucratic life and been influenced by modernist nationalist thought. Nevertheless, he succeeded in transforming the “sons of Ibn Majid” into “sons of Sinbad”, insofar as he engaged with the figure of Sinbad as the most prominent cultural symbol of Gulf navigation and the Gulf seafarer.

Alrabei traced the historical ascent of Sinbad through two intersecting discursive frameworks: Orientalism and Arab literary modernity. He focused on key texts from each framework, including A Contemporary Sinbad: Voyages in the Indian Ocean (1938) and The Discourse of the Ancient Sinbad (1943) by the Egyptian traveler Hussein Fawzi; Sons of Sinbad (1940) by the Australian orientalist Alan Villiers; and Memoirs of a Sailor (1964) by Al-Fayez.

In conclusion, Alrabei affirmed that his lecture forms part of a broader research project on attempts to reproduce local maritime knowledge and the ways in which it has been subjected to and adapted in the service of major cultural narratives such as Arab nationalism, Indian Ocean studies, Orientalism, and postcolonial theory. The contested representations of maritime history in the Gulf reflect deeper tensions related to the region’s historical and cultural memory, the effects of which remain present.