Exercising the Body, Exercising Citizenship: On the History of Scouting in Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACT

Scouting was one of the first modern ‘sports’ to reach Saudi Arabia, with the first boy scout troops dating back to 1943. Yet scouting has largely escaped the attention of historians and social scientist who study the Arab Gulf states, since this uniformed youth movement does not conform to the ‘tribal modern’ identity that is today propagated and researched within the region, as found, for example, in the discourse on heritage sports. How did a Saudi scouting movement take root, importing what is still largely perceived to be a Western cultural practice, identified with a white British-North American middle class? The research demonstrates that the scouting movement was able to take hold in the region by negotiating the universal ideals of modernity and internationalism of the scouting movement with more particular understandings of nationalism and social reform. Following the trajectories of the early Saudi scouting movement, the analysis traces how the conception of what constitutes ‘modern’ evolved from an understanding that emphasizes universal traits, toward a negotiated and particularised interpretation of what ‘modern’ means and should mean in the local context of Saudi Arabia.

KEYWORDS:

• Saudi Arabia
• scouting
• education
• community service

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the organisers of the workshop “The Rise of International Sport on the Arab Peninsula” at the Gulf Research Meeting in Cambridge, UK, in 2018, where I presented an early version of this article, and all participants for their helpful comments and suggestions for the paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These dates are from the organizations’ respective country pages, accessed 23 January 2018.

2. These statistics date back to 2002. Given the latest hype in physical exercise and national tourism—pushed by the Saudi state’s Vision 2030—we can assume that the numbers have risen considerably since then.

3. In 2018, Arab News reported about 4500 boy and girls scouts in Mecca and 1500 in Medina assisting the pilgrims, see Anna Pukas, ‘Scouts: A Colonial-Age Movement Formed by Christians, Cherished by Millions of Muslims Worldwide’, Arab News, 29 September 2018, at https://www.arabnews.com/node/1379526/saudi-arabia, accessed 11 September 2019.

4. Royal Decree (al-marsūm al-malikī) No. 22, dated 20.09.1961 (9.4.1381 h.).

5. Al-Maktab al-ʿArabī al-Kashfī, al-Muʾtamar wa-l-muʿaskr al-ʿarabī al-kashfī al-thānī 1956/ 1375 h., conference report. Cairo: Al-Maṭbaʿa al-ʿĀlamiyya, 41–43.

6. ‘World Scouting Welcomes the Iraq Scout Association’, https://www.scout.org/es/node/366936, 17 August 2017, accessed 11 September 2019.