The Hejaz Railway

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the Hejaz Railway. The Hejaz Railway is a unique archaeological and anthropological object, created for different reasons by various financial means from across the Muslim world—from faith-based donations and taxation, to the selling of archaeological heritage, and from the manufacture of stamps and honours to the acquisition of sheepskins. These resources were transmuted, in a sense recycled into rail tracks, embankments, bridges, station buildings, and rolling stock—all underwritten by imperial-military, regional, and geo-political realities cloaked in religious intent. Even the route was hybrid, a palimpsest belonging, variously, to prehistoric, Nabatean, Roman, and Byzantine trade pathways; Ottoman Hajj roads; and railway modernity. At the beginning of the twentieth century, as the railroad moved through this millennia-old landscape, it became a catalyst for conflict, embedded in a war which changed the region and the world.