Omer Shah

Omer Shah is a cultural anthropologist. His research interests include religion and secularism, expertise and knowledge production, and surveillance and security.

His current book project, Made in Mecca: Expertise, Technology, and Hospitality in the Post-Oil Holy City, examines recent efforts by the Saudi state to intensify and optimize Mecca’s pilgrimage through new sciences and technologies of crowd management, logistics and secular hospitality. His project demonstrates how these new forms of knowledge production operate in tension with older and decidedly more Islamic ways of knowing, managing and belonging in the holy city. Instead of approaching religious knowledge and secular knowledge as discrete spheres, Shah’s research explores their entanglements and aporias across a range of techno-political practices: navigation, hospitality, urban planning, systems thinking, crowd management, and optimization. Critically, his work argues that even in this moment of ritual intensity, the cosmopolitan logics of the holy city come to be blunted.

“7 Artifacts from the Smart City Being Built on the Back of the Ancient Sanctuary” in Flint Magazine, Issue No. 3, 2022.

“Screening Meccan Logistics,” Logistics in the Time of Covid, 2021.

“Crowds and Expertise: An Interview with Omer Shah,” The Derivative, Beirut Art Center, 2020.

“Mecca: The Weird and the Eerie” (Short Film), Jaffat Al-Aqlam, October 2020.