“I will know that I have succeeded when people begin to cherish our heritage and begin to pass it on,” said Baeshen, who was a professor of English literature at the Jeddah’s King Abdulaziz University.īaeshen is one of the Kingdom’s few avid collectors of folklore and traditional music. She says preserving folkloric tales and songs - which to this day can still be heard in the zigzagging “Old Arabia” streets of Jeddah’s historic center, known as Al-Balad - is not just a passing fancy, but also a cultural responsibility. Lamia Baeshen is on a mission to preserve the culture of the Hijaz, the western region of Saudi Arabia that has Jeddah as its unofficial capital.
