This book was published to mark the centenary of Ameen Rihani's "Makers of Modern Arabia," offering a new perspective on history as a vibrant, living experience, not merely a collection of narrated events. It presents a tapestry where narrative intertwines with poetry, research with memory, and images with documents.

Can history be told in a panoramic structure where its pillars alternate between narrative and poetry, quotation and translation, research and documentation, photography and oral memory? With this question, Ahmed Al-Ali embarks on "The Oil," crafting a literary-historical work that blends research precision with linguistic beauty, reshaping history as a lived human experience.

The journey revolves around Al-Ahsa, the largest oasis in eastern Saudi Arabia—renowned for its palm groves and water springs, and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Its destiny changed with the discovery of oil, transforming it into home to the world's largest oil field. From Ameen Rihani's tent in Al-Uqair, to King Abdulaziz's majlis in Riyadh, to Muhammad Ali Pasha's palace in Cairo, to "Saint George" cafe in Beirut with Philby, all the way to the fields that witnessed the dawn of the oil era—the author traces the transformations of place and people in a narrative structure unconstrained by time, but by the dramatic rhythm of the story.

Chapters open with historical quotes and references that set the scene, followed by a literary text in which Al-Ali writes from the present, engaging with the past, questioning, and reflecting.

"The Oil" blends history and literature to place the reader at the heart of the transformation that reshaped the features of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula with the discovery of oil, and how its people balanced preserving their authentic values with openness to the world, dialogue, and coexistence.

A work written by the author with the consciousness of a historian and the soul of a poet, combining the warmth of narrative with the precision of documentation, to create a human portrait of transformation and memory, and of a region that became a global center and a constant topic of discussion.