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Omer Shah, , is using a $6,000 summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to write two chapters of his monograph, Made in Mecca: Expertise, Techno-politics, and Hospitality in the Post-Oil Holy City.

Shah is the second Pomona cultural anthropologist in as many years to receive an NEH summer stipend.

“I’m truly honored to have this professional recognition from such a prestigious fellowship,” he says.

Shah’s fascination with Mecca started after he completed the Hajj pilgrimage while a senior in college.

Later, the Scranton, Pennsylvania, native conducted two years of field work in the holy city of Islam for his doctoral dissertation, exploring how over the years Mecca—the third most populous city in Saudi Arabia and one of the most visited cities in the world—had become a lab for crowd management, surveillance and logistics.

That extensive research created the intellectual backbone for his current book project, which he hopes to complete by January.

The Hajj pilgrimage “was a really powerful and transformative experience,” Shah recalls. “I developed a deep intellectual curiosity about how [Mecca] is managed. I became interested in the technologies and the logistics of religion.”

Based in Brooklyn this summer, Shah found a desk to rent and started making his manuscript read more as a book than a dissertation. He also has been working on establishing his own voice, arguments and claims as a scholar.

“This project has been in motion for a while,” Shah says, “but I think it’s only now that I’m beginning to see it properly as a book. It has required a lot of reorganization, breaking chapters apart and putting them back together again.”

While in Mecca years ago, Shah spent time with academics, tech workers and people he considered “more unique” to the holy city, such as Islamic scholars. This eclectic cast of characters offered different perspectives on how technology can or should work in a place so rooted in ancient rituals.

Saudi Arabia’s new national transformation plan includes an ambitious goal to nearly quadruple the number of annual pilgrims, from eight million to 30 million, by 2030—an increase that could bring significant wealth to the kingdom in the long term.

Captivated by the effort to make these crowds into an economic resource for a government generating a billion dollars a day in oil sales, Shah continues to explore how this new approach operates in tension with older and decidedly more Islamic ways of knowing, managing and belonging in the holy city.

Shah’s work examines that tension, and he aspires to explain how the religious and secular in Mecca compete, but also collaborate in certain ways.

“I try to vivify what’s specific about Mecca, unique about Mecca, but also what’s general about Mecca and how that clicks into a more secular world of nation-states, capitalism and the making of cutting-edge technologies,” he says.

Shah will teach a course on migration in the Middle East in the fall, as well as the senior thesis design seminar—a writing workshop for anthropology seniors.

“While there are tremendous differences between a book manuscript and a senior thesis or project,” he says, “I think that my experiences writing, re-writing, editing, mapping, and thinking about structure will be helpful to students.”

“I always half-joke to my students,” Shah adds, “‘Be careful what you select as your senior project in college, it might be with you some 20 years later.’”