Earlier this year, the government announced the new holiday will be celebrated with a day off for both public and private sector workers, and released a vintage-looking logo used to mark the event.
The Saudi English-daily Arab News features a fascinating report on how historians and experts in the Kingdom worked to reveal the actual founding day as 17 years off from previous recording, instead using the first date of Bin Saud’s first day as ruler of Diryiah, in what is now modern-day Riyadh, instead of his alliance with Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdulwahhab.“There is no doubt that the events of 1744, the year in which Imam Mohammed ibn Saud of Diriyah offered sanctuary to the religious reformer Sheikh Mohammed ibn Abdulwahhab, were hugely significant….But over time the importance of that admittedly historic moment of common cause between state and faith came to obscure the far more complex and deeper-rooted origins of the First Saudi State…
“It is to correct this neglect of the Kingdom’s crucial embryonic years that Founding Day has been created, to celebrate 1727 as the true moment of birth and to give Saudis a deeper appreciation of a past far richer than many realize.”“The theoretical effort of “laying the foundation” for Founding Day is crucial to building states, cementing identity, and enlightening society. The Saudi identity is coherent, modernist, and developed; and like identities throughout history and across the globe, it must be reimagined and reestablished constantly, especially during transitional, historic periods. Today in Saudi Arabia, this effort takes the form of Vision 2030.”