New Arabian Studies is an international journal covering a wide spectrum of topics including geography, archaeology, history, architecture, agriculture, language, dialect, sociology, documents, literature and religion. It provides authoritative information intended to appeal to both the specialist and general reader. Both the traditional and the modern aspects of Arabia are covered, excluding contemporary controversial politics. Contributions by Hussein Abdullah al-Amri, Madawi Al-Rasheed, W. J. Donaldson, A. B. D. R. Eagle, Andrey Korotayev, Richard I. Lawless, Eric Macro, Brian Marshall, Mikhail Rodionov, Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle, Martine Vanhove and Jerzy Zdanowski

This book retrieves from the archives people, places and perspectives normally overlooked to tell an original and expansive history of the Qatar Peninsula, paying close attention to landscape and the natural world. The arc of the book moves geographically through the landscape and chronologically through selected sources, drawing on digitised maps, manuscripts, hydrographic surveys, government records, traveller accounts, early photographs, archaeological and ethnographic reports. While these are standard sources recruited by Qatar to tell its own singular, streamlined history, this book is a subversive reading of those sources. It braids together elusive and precarious stories – difficult to find, at risk of being lost, and never before brought together into a single volume – to write a more complicated story of place. Through them, we can reimagine a place that, like many in the world, works hard to control a limited set of stories about itself. Readers who know something about Qatar will be surprised by the book’s nuances and details. Readers who know little or nothing will be drawn in to discover that, even in the most out-of-the-way and inhospitable places, deserts are never empty.