As communities tried to make sense of COVID-19, media outlets around the world reached for illustrative examples of past pandemics. In Qatif, a city on Saudi Arabia's Persian Gulf coast, memories of a 1970 quarantine surfaced in local media as the pandemic unfolded. This article investigates why COVID-19 prompted public remembering of a state-imposed cholera quarantine in Qatif in 1970 by reconstructing three formative assemblages of disease and popular politics. First, a 1953 speech by leftist activist Nasir al-Saʿid in the wake of massive strikes demonstrates how activists rhetorically connected the labor movement in Eastern Province with popular demands for health care. Second, the shift from neglect of localized epidemics to the state's expanding reach into quotidian life from the 1940s through the 1960s shows how even as public health developed as a tool of governance, local people interpreted medical services as manifestations of privilege and inequality. The final section explores how expanding state authority over Eastern Province and the state's embrace of coercive epidemic management converged on the regime's 1970 cholera quarantine in Qatif. In the twenty-first-century COVID-19 response, public memory of the 1970 quarantine has provided a space for people to articulate competing narratives. Linking together these constellations of health and politics renders visible patterns of repression and protest in a public sphere that typically silences histories of dissent.

This article examines ʿAbd al-Ilah al-Qinaʿi's early 20th-century melding of local, imperial, and transoceanic health practices alongside his 21st-century reemergence as a protonational Kuwaiti doctor. In the early 20th century, geographically and ideologically expansive horizons of health care fostered the emergence of hybrid medical practices. Facilitated by his access to multiple medical spheres and his proximity to Kuwait's rulers, ʿAbd al-Ilah was uniquely positioned to meet the demands of health-seeking consumers. In the 21st century, Kuwaitis' search for a national history that naturalizes claims to citizenship has resulted in ʿAbd al-Ilah's new designation as Kuwait's first doctor. Both processes—the interplay between local cultures of health and emergent institutions and the imagining of medical history as a nativist teleology—demonstrate how health-seeking and history-writing efforts of a range of historical actors have placed medicine at the center of politics in Kuwait.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic evoked anxieties that were tied to Kuwait’s particular histories of gendered citizenship and dislocations of globalized labor. In Kuwait, to the best of our knowledge, HIV/AIDS has not reached epidemic levels. But in the midst of global discussions of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s, anxiety surrounding Kuwait’s integration into transnational networks of travel and tourism brought tensions over gender roles, citizenship, sexuality, and infidelity to the forefront of public discourse. Drawing on local Arabic-language newspapers, public health campaign material, and state-sponsored publications on Islamic interpretations of HIV/AIDS, this article examines the significance of AIDS in a region where reactions to the pandemic centered on the process of constructing a potential medical event. Citizens and noncitizen residents of Kuwait articulated these anxieties in the context of waiting—waiting to be infected, waiting for a national outbreak, waiting in quarantine, and, for noncitizens who tested positive for HIV, waiting to be deported. By the mid-1990s, this process of anticipating and taking concrete legal measures to prevent a future epidemic resulted in the medicalization of social and political patterns of gender inequality, nativism, and differential citizenship.

No abstract