Michael Christopher Low is Assistant Professor of History and Director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. Low is the author of Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj (Columbia University Press, 2020). In 2021, Imperial Mecca received the Middle East Studies Association’s Albert Hourani Book Award and was shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize. Imperial Mecca has since been translated into Arabic and Turkish. Low is also co-editor of The Subjects of Ottoman International Law (Indiana University Press, 2020). 

In 2020-2021, Low was a Senior Humanities Fellow for the Study of the Arab World at NYU Abu Dhabi. He is currently working on a new book, Saltwater Kingdoms: Fossil-Fueled Water and Climate Change in Arabia, under contract with University of California Press. 

In this talk I will share my knowledge of an undisputed truism that the story of the twentieth-century Arabian Peninsula is synonymous with oil. And while oil and gas pipelines have rightfully been understood as the infrastructural lifeblood of the region’s meteoric rise, another set of pipelines and processing plants has remained virtually invisible to historians, desalination facilities. Despite this seeming invisibility, all Gulf states have embraced fossil-fueled solutions to address their acute water problems. Thus, instead of petro-states, this lecture argues that we also need to understand Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors as desalination powerhouses or Saltwater Kingdoms. If one man’s biography could represent this understudied feature of Gulf life, it would likely be narrated through the stranger-than-fiction story of the “Water Prince,” Muhammad bin Faisal Al Saud: desalination pioneer, architect of the Saudi Saline Water Conversion Corporation, and much-caricatured iceberg entrepreneur.