Category Archives: Culture

July 1, 2009 · 1:06 am

Love in KSA

Yesterday Riyadh Newspaper carried a story about a couple. Their relationship ended horribly when the guy blackmailed the girl into meeting him on a secluded roof. Only she came with a bottle of acid. She agreed that he would be there first waiting for her and when she got there he had already gotten down to his undies in anticipation but what he got was acid poured on his pelvic area. Unfortunately she was unable to get away before he had wrestled the acid from her and attacked her with it. They both started screaming in pain but no one came so they somehow managed to get down and run into the street where some civilians took them to the hospital. They were found to have 40% third degree burns and put in ICU.

What the guy was using to blackmail the girl was not mentioned in the article. However I’m betting that it was something relatively trivial like a photo with her face uncovered all dressed up to go to a party or maybe it was a tape recording of an illicit phone conversation, something that would not really be substantial enough to blackmail a single Muslim girl into sex anywhere else in the world except Saudi Arabia. What with so much being forbidden and our culture of shame one, shame the whole family, the stakes are so high. A girl who lets her guard down for a second sometimes will have to spend her whole life paying for it. I remember a friend of mine who was really smart and graduated from high school with a 98% and got accepted into the computer science department at King Saud University. Only she had the bad habit of making phone boyfriends during her years in high school, so her parents forced her the summer she graduated high school to marry a distant cousin who also happens to be a school drop out just so ‘yistir aliyha’, an Arabic term that means to cover her or to shield her from people’s talk. I visited her after she settled down and she told me that she had saved the bedsheet she lost her virginity to her husband on. I asked her why? She said it was like a keepsake but I believe it’s more than that. It’s her proof. Within a year she had a baby and we lost touch but I heard that she had many more babies and I don’t know if she ever got the chance to go to college. All because she liked to talk to guys over the phone. Granted that is a problem on a religious level but if it was only religion, her parents would have not taken such extremes to cure her of it. If this daughter got a reputation that she talks to guys, she would not only ruin her prospects of marriage, but that of her sisters. Hence her parents were sacrificing her for the sake of the family. It’s complicated with centuries and layers of tradition and culture and I’m not sure I personally want it to change but it would be nice if they would ease up a little on the girls so that they wouldn’t have to tote bottles of acid every time an innocent photo gets out.

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June 29, 2009 · 9:24 am

Quit smoking and we’ll give you a wedding

Al Naqa Charity association has started a campaign to encourage Saudi citizens to quit smoking. Posters are hung on all the major streets stating in Arabic “You quit and we’ll give you a wedding”. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Saudi Arabia, knows that getting married is a costly affair for the groom. And what the charity is paying for is the wedding and dowry, they aren’t going to find a bride or mediate, just pay the bills. So far so good. Last Sunday a writer in al Watan newspaper Maha Al Jahilan slammed the charity comparing what the charity is offering to selling sex. I especially enjoyed her melodramatic conclusion which I translated:

Isn’t presenting a woman as a prize to a person who quits smoking comparable to what primitive societies did when they sacrificed women to gods by throwing them into rivers, or wild animals? Wouldn’t it be better if the charity offered to find jobs for the quitters to raise their income, or offered to help them in housing, or continue their education, or self-improvement courses instead of finding a solution that would create worse and uglier problem?

 Come on?! Is she serious? I consider myself a Saudi feminist if there ever was one and I saw those posters long before I read about them. It never occurred to me that they were demeaning to women. Her suggestions are fine and so is paying for a quitter’s marriage costs. But probably the charity’s idea might be a stronger motivator for the younger love-stricken smokers. But if people who are calling for more women rights in Saudi raise arms at every silly thing then that will undermine what they stand for and the conservatives won’t take then as seriously.

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April 7, 2009 · 10:12 pm

Divorce in Saudi Arabia

No matter how many reports you read about the rise in numbers of divorce cases in Saudi Arabia, it still remains a dirty word that Saudis are taught not to even contemplate. For my generation and those younger, there is a growing number who rebel. But for older couples it is still very true. No matter how much they hate each other, divorce is not an option. “Real” men and women never divorce. We are taught in schools that it is the most abhorred by God of all things Islamically permitted. Couples have separate bedrooms on different floors and lead chiefly separate lives and yet are still married. A man might take on a second wife and not see his first except twice a month to pay the bills and buy groceries. He does it because he thinks its manly and the woman stays on and is patient because that’s what a good woman does.

This like all other things is changing. After reading a report on this in Arab News, I thought I would write a bit about it. In Saudi Arabia there are two ways to obtain a divorce depending on who initiates it, the first is easy and can be done by the husband and the second is extremely hard and is reserved for the wife. The first can be done by the husband simply by deciding in his heart to divorce his wife and in effect this becomes valid immediately. Then in his own time he can go to the courts and obtain a document of his decision and send a copy to the ex-wife. Alimony and child custody is not a big deal either and definitely not mandated. Several women I personally know have never gotten any financial support from their ex-husbands. And in the case they are allowed child custody, its only because the father is not interested in caring for the kids. So in essence he is allowing the mother to have them. This and most other issues related to family law is only loosely based on Islam and what really goes on is the absolute vilification of the wife in court while the husband is always taken at his word. I know you might be thinking that I’m exaggerating but seriously I’m not.

When it comes to the wife initiating a divorce it is a whole different issue. It’s not even called divorce, it’s called khula which literally means taking off as in taking off clothes or jewelry. What the woman has to do is prove that the husband did something. Abuse whether physical or verbal does not get a woman far in court even with a medical report because the Saudi judges tend to believe that she probably did something to provoke it. The only proof that will absolve the woman and get her treated favorably is one of three; proof that the husband is a drug addict, has AIDS or being a daughter of a VIP. Otherwise the process is stressful, expensive and might lead to her never seeing her children again. In one case the judge and his assistants demanded from the wife that she detail her husband’s performance in bed. Another woman had to pay her dowry back in full after more than a decade of marriage and four children. Some of those years she financially supported her then husband and yet she still had to give back the money he spent on her as a young bride and give up child custody completely. To rub salt into injury, she was hushed in court while listening to the guy tell everyone there including her father and brothers how horny she was and that she wouldn’t be doing this unless she had someone else in mind to marry.

However after everything settles down, within society it is much better for a woman to obtain a khula rather than be divorced. Divorced women are usually viewed as having done something wrong but a woman who obtains a khula is a victim. It’s as if society understands that the difficulty of the process shows in some way that women do not go through with it except as a last resort after being tremendously wronged.

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March 21, 2009 · 10:25 am

Hayat (PVPV) al Badiah assualts a citizen after he dropped off his wife at a mall

 

al-qahtani

This article was in Al Riyadh newspaper on Thursday and I fully expected it to be translated and published in Arab News on Friday. As it hasn’t been, I thought I would do the honors:

A Saudi citizen, Al Qahtani, has requested that the authorities open an investigation with members of the PVPV, Badi’ah Branch, accusing them of assaulting him and tearing his clothes after he had dropped off his wife at a local mall.
Al Qahtani told the authorities that his wife had wanted to meet up with her family at a mall west of Riyadh and after he dropped her off he went to a nearby grocery shop where he was accosted by a group of men and pulled outside. They forced him into a car that had the PVPV logo on it.

Al Qahtani added that they then took him back to the mall where he had left his wife and during the trip they insulted him and called him names that he alleged should never come from a Muslim man’s mouth. At the mall, they forcefully pulled his wife outside amid her screams and a gathering crowd. They then interrogated us.

The PVPV members then took Al Qahtani to their Badiah offices and confiscated his car, mobile and wallet. They examined and searched the contents of each.
When the PVPV members finally figured out that they were wrong, the assailants warned Al Qahtani to not report the incident to the papers and one of the members even admitted that he had just finished a course in how to interact with the public.

Al Qahtani requests through this article that the General President of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, Sheikh Abdul Aziz Ahumain investigate the matter and hold the assailants accountable for how they treated him and his wife. He added that his wife is now traumatized since the incident.

It should be noted that the citizen filed an official complaint at the Police Department against the individuals who assaulted him. And in turn, Riyadh Newspaper contacted PVPV  Badi’ah Branch and could not get any response.

The comments on the newspaper website were 951. I glanced quickly through them and noticed a shift in that previously when such incidents are reported the majority of the comments were made by zealous fans of the PVPV who would go as far as blame those who write negatively about the PVPV for the bad weather because God is punishing us for criticizing the PVPV. And there are some who believe that the PVPV are the extension or at the same level as the Sahaba, the Prophet’s (PBUH) companions. These people did ot have the usual strong presence but there were a few who are in denial regarding the PVPV’s behaviour. They write that either the assailants were not PVPV but men posing as PVPV to dirty their reputation and others wrote that Al Qahtani has to have done something wrong, otherwise these men would not have done this. But I was happy to see that even those who seem like extreme fundamentals have started to write that we should hold PVPV individuals accountable.

I don’t know what really happened but I don’t think that Al Qahtani would take it this far if he had been lying or even exaggerating. I do know of a friend of mine who was out at a fast food restaurant with her brother for dinner and the PVPV  refused to believe that they were brother and sister and took them to the PVPVheadquarters where their father had to come and get them. They were not physically harmed but it was distressing to have to prove that they were siblings just because they wanted a quick bite to eat. And a relative of mine has been interrogated several times at coffee shops whenever he takes his wife out. What my friend and my relative’s wife have in common is that both do like to dress in expensive and embroidered abayas and they both did not have young children with them. So maybe that was what caused the PVPV in Al Qahtani’s case to jump to conclusions.

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March 16, 2009 · 1:16 pm

Bad day + bad comment =

This is in reply to a comment made by um Maraym in the previous post:

Salam Um Maryam

Just by your “kinya” I can tell you are one of those “reverts” who treat Islam as though it was a cult or an exclusive club that is defined by outer appearances ( tent like abaya) and completely confuse religion and Arab culture.

No those women who you say:

“rather than your religious police, the only people who I find ridiculous are a particular class of saudi woman. One sees them at the Kingdom center or the Faisalyah, aimlessly wandering around, caked in makeup.They way they wear their abyas, would make a western prostitute blush, I’m not sure why they are so shallow, perhaps its lack of education, or its the inbreeding, or perhaps its the free money from the govenrment that has lead to this dysfunctional social pathology.”

These women are never going to be written about on my blog because these women have never banned others from driving their own cars and have never jailed and deported 75 year old widows because they had bread delivered by an unrelated man…etc. It’s your like and your Saudi versions who work against their own sisters. Tell your point of view to the Saudi women who are forced to guard toilets for money while next door in the same mall a foreign man is brought into the country for the sole purpose of selling lingerie for three times the salary she gets. And express your adoration of muttawas to the countless women I know who have been harassed, stalked, traumatized and publicly insulted by them. Why would I write about women minding their own business when I can write about women like you who judge them. Why don’t you say the same about the desperate pathetic men who troll around the malls in the latest designer wear and reeking of expensive perfumes?  Why don’t I write about my cousins who have had to borrow thousands in order to get out of abusive marriages when Islamic shariah law clearly states that women who are abused are allowed divorce. And what about writing about how a friend of mine was asked by a taxi driver if she would like him to pimp her out? A respectable woman whose only problem is that she had to resort to a daily taxi because she is banned from driving her own car. And how about newly appointed teachers who monthly pay half their salary just for a ride to work?

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March 15, 2009 · 11:48 pm

An interview with a muttawa trainer

dean Khalid interviewed by newspaper

In Al Madina newspaper yesterday there was an interview with the dean of the high institute of the prevention of vice and promotion of virtue (PVPV), Khalid Al Shammrani, PhD. This is the guy who teaches muttawas how to do it professionally and let me tell you it is not pretty. The institute was established in 2004 in order to assist in countering the bad behavior of the PVPVs in dealing with people. It’s where a muttawa can get a one year postgraduate diploma in telling people how to live their lives. Dean Khalid put it beautifully when he was asked about what they train muttawas to do, he said a muttawa is trained to handle “the person of sin” as a doctor handles a patient; sometimes a doctor has to be tough on his patient to ensure healing and so does a muttawa with a person of sin has to resort to Islamically sanctioned means to heal sin and then have the offender reprimanded by the courts.

 In the interview published yesterday, dean Khalid expressed his frustration with the ministry of labour because they have been trying to provide jobs for Saudi women. He stated that this is not an area for the ministry to delve in and that it is unacceptable. He moved on to say that the gap that is growing between the people and the PVPV is artificially created by the media. He accused the media of purposely misleading public opinion by giving the PVPV bad publicity and not being objective in its reporting. He backs this up with a claim that opinion polls show that Saudis want the PVPV. Dean Khalid believes that all this demand for more rights and jobs for women is due to western influence. He also announced the founding of a new charity and organization for the study of the importance of the PVPV in Islam and to modernize the PVPV so that it is better able to face today’s kinds of sins. And so on and so forth.

In all his interviews he calls what the PVPV is doing accountability and the muttawas are the ones who make sure that people are accountable for their “sins”. What first caught my attention was of course his take on employing women and I am not alone on this because the newspaper put it as the headline of the article. So the ministry of labour has infringed its area by attempting to encourage the employment of Saudi women and the PVPV are here to put Al Qosaibi in his place and rescue women back to poverty and objectification. I bet that dean Khalid thought that the headline was going to be about the new organization.

Even though I live it, I am constantly shocked by how these muttawas dismiss women as infant-like and not deserving of the most basic rights. But above all I hate Saudi women for lying down and taking it, myself included.

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February 27, 2009 · 4:45 am

Shias and Sunnis in Saudi Arabia

Long before the Madinah affair, I’ve thought about writing a post on the difference between Shia and Sunnis and then I thought why put myself in a minefield of misunderstandings. After reconsideration, I reasoned that nothing ever gets resolved by keeping quiet so I might as well write. When the Madinah affair happened this week, I tried to get informed but that is not possible with our “on a strict need to know” basis news organizations and biased websites. Youtube is even worse, all I could find on there was a bunch of chaotic crowds that could be either Sunni or Shia. So this is not a post on that particular incident, it’s a general post from someone who was raised Sunni, visited Qatif (where Saudi Shias are concentrated) and taught hundreds of students of both sects.  

 Before the international spread of the internet and Iraqi war, not much was heard or written about sectarian differences in Islam. The majority of Arabs are Sunnis with Arab Shias concentrated in Bahrain, Lebanon and Iraq. In Saudi Arabia they are a minority with most originating from the eastern region. The break in Islam into the two sects reminds me of the break between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, with Shias resembling the Catholics with all these saints and rituals and Sunnis resembling Orthodoxies with an emphasis on puritanical practices. I have seen paintings of Ali bin Talib (RAA) that could just as well have been paintings of Jesus in a church with the beard and long hair. Saudi Sunnis interpretation of Islam could be considered as parallel to the Amish and Mormon interpretations of Christianity. If you squint and glaze over the details, the history looks quite similar, with Islam currently being in its own version of the Dark Age.  

At a more personal level my experience has been mostly neutral with phases of mystification with what I hear about Shias. However my sources were questionable as they were other Sunnis like myself. I have attempted a few times to ask Shias I know about their interpretation but it was awkward and uncomfortable. Online it’s even worse when you are looking for answers from a Sunni to Shia perspective and vice versa because those forums are just a bunch of narrow minded idiots exchanging vulgar insults.

Growing up, I would hear about Shias, mostly students studying at the colleges here in the capital. Within Saudi Sunni circles controversy surrounding the Shias centers around four claims:  

1- Warnings that Shias gain religious points by harming Sunnis

2- Watch Shias the day after Ashoora (Islamic day) because they always wear long sleeves and turtle-necks to hide their injuries

3- They reject and insult some of the prophet’s closest companions.

4- And of course Mutaa’ marriages (pleasure based marriages that are temporary and require no witnesses or legal papers). And I would like to note here that I was shocked to learn that this was also ok in Sunni Islam until very late in the Prophet Muhamed’s lifetime (PBUH).

When my family lived in the US we became good friends with another Saudi family who happened to be Shias from Qatif. Once back in Saudi Arabia, we visited them at their home in Qatif. It was quite fun. The family was liberal and we all sat together men and women. They also introduced us to the man’s brother and we got invited to the brother’s house as well. It was generally a pleasant experience. Qatif itself is similar to Qaseem; lots of old building and a whole bunch of areas that are called villages but to me might as well be one great big city because the distance between them doesn’t qualify them to be separate villages. They returned the visit when they came to Riyadh and the wife did something that my whole family thought was strange. They were over for dinner but she would not eat or drink anything. This could be something idiosyncratic especially considering that her husband was natural and dug in with the rest of us. But my family could not help but think that it was rude and that she might have done something to our food when we were over at their house. Again this might have nothing to do with religion or she might have thought that we meant to harm her as part of our Sunni practices. The friendship originated with the men and was strong between my father and her husband. The ladies, my mother and the wife were just playing nice and her not even drinking a cup of tea put a damper on things. Later on I got to know a lot more Saudi Shias as colleagues and students. What makes them stand out is their Arabic accent which reminds me of the Bahraini Arabic accent and the fact that they are generally more serious and hard-working than my Najdi and Hijazi students. They rarely have the spoiled materialistic air about them that the others do.

I predict that sectarian differences will remain for awhile and some warfare will be based on it, as is the case in Iraq. But eventually Arab Muslims will see the pointlessness of their squabbles and inequities. They’ll learn to be more religiously introspective rather than the current state of self-righteousness and fixation on correcting everybody else’s beliefs.

  This post was not meant to offend anyone and I welcome comments here.

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February 25, 2009 · 2:09 am

The problem lies within

With the exception of the Human Rights Organization, to my knowledge there are no organized associations or unions of women rights activists in Saudi Arabia. Those who care are doing it individually and at the local level quietly. Most of them, like myself, are talking to the outside world more than the inside. On the other hand, women who believe in their own oppression are organized in so called religious groups; Quran circles, charity organizations, and teach their point of view in schools. They have seemingly infinite financial backing to publish all the literature they need to get across their narrow interpretations of Islam. Some women even work for the vice cops. And this is the problem. It’s not the government that oppresses women, it’s the women themselves who believe in this ideology and pass it along to their daughters. The problem lies in the imbalance of information. The ultra-conservative interpretation of Arab traditions and Islam is officially sanctioned by the government, so it is taught (actually drilled into) students through the curriculum and occasional lectures by sheikhs and women Islamic missionaries. Then outside of school they are reminded of it through the distribution of free pamphlets at social gatherings, hospital waiting rooms, and even when shopping. Sometimes street ads are paid for to show an abaya and a flower where the face is supposed to be to get across that women are flowers that should be covered and protected. Ironic, considering that flowers don’t thrive unless they are out in the sun. And if you try to discuss this oppression of women and human rights with these ultra-conservatives and their selectiveness in the use of Islamic texts, it all boils down to “the prevention of sin” argument.

At the same time people who believe in a more broad interpretation of Islamic texts are not allowed to express their opinion. When they do, they are quickly dismissed as secularists and liberals as if these were profane terms. They are also quickly assumed as not being really Saudi. I can’t count the number of times that other Saudis have assumed that I am from mixed heritage. Your mother must be Syrian, Egyptian or Turkish, they tell me. When I tell them that my parents were neighbors who grew up together in the Qaseem region, they are unfailingly shocked. All this just because I happen to voice a different opinion from the accepted walking jewels who are put on this Earth for the enjoyment of men, shopping and popping out kids. I digress. My point here is that we should have a more moderate Islam that is grown locally through Saudi literature, women rights awareness and respectable examples. Young ladies should not be made to feel guilty or rebellious just because they don’t like covering their faces or want to drive. As if wanting these means they carry some lewd ulterior motive.

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February 15, 2009 · 2:56 pm

First Saudi Woman Minister

Today is definitely a happy day. Saudi Arabia has made a leap of progress. King Abdullah surprised everyone yesterday morning with major overhauls to the judicial and educational system. And the biggest bombshell of all was that a woman was appointed as head of girl’s education. This is a position that has always belonged to the longest bearded most conservative muttawa possible and now to have a woman in it is FANTASTIC, notwithstanding the fact that the woman who was chosen is a moderate Muslim, educated and a highly qualified woman. She has extensive experience in girl’s education. I doubt that that they could have found anyone more qualified.  

What I found most surprising and I’m sure that someone out there wanted to send a message by publishing this on the first page of Al Eqtisadiya (Saudi version of Financial Times):

15022009062

If you take a closer look at the left hand corner, you’ll see a photo of Mrs. Nora Al Fayez right underneath a photo of the new head of the muttawa vice police. Her face is uncovered.

150220090641

Now there’s a lot of buzz that of course she wouldn’t be this progressive unless she was a non-tribal woman, probably originating from Jordan or Palestine and she definitely is divorced because no “real” Saudi in his right mind would allow his wife to appear publicly with her face uncovered. I am very proud to say that actually she belongs to one of the biggest tribes in Saudi, Bani Tameem from Al Nawayser part of it and she is from Al Washim here in Najd. Her husband very much supports her and is proud of her.

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February 15, 2009 · 2:36 am

The Saudi Obsession

Saudi men are obsessed with women. That is a fair statement that few will argue. Some will even go as far as to say that most men are, regardless of nationality. But the degree to which Saudis are obsessed is amazing. When I read about and firsthand experience how men view women, it makes me feel sub-human. Strangely this is not shared by my fellow country women. I am always shocked at how many Saudi women believe that they really are sub humans that can be compared to glass bottles, flowers, cakes and sheep preyed on by Saudi wolves.  A funny story that illustrates the objectification of women here is a story a friend told me today. She works at a medical training environment so it is mixed gender. The men were performing afternoon prayer when a woman colleague walked by. She was wearing loose formal pants, a knee length lab-coat and her hair and face were covered in black except for the eyes. After the prayer, the director of the facility called a female manager to his office and demanded to know who the woman who walked by was. He was outraged because he claimed that her walking by them during prayer caused them all to be sexually aroused! And so that ruined their prayer. And now unlike the majority of medicine related facilities, women employees are not allowed to wear pants.

 Another interesting example is a fatwa that Turki Al Dakheel republished in an article this week. I absolutely love the guy. He reminds me of my husband. They both originally come from the same ultra conservative Qaseemi city of Buraida and they both have gone through the dark tunnel of muttawaism to come out the other side enlightened and better individuals. Anyway the fatwa  is in answer to a question on the Islamic viewpoint on women participating in online public forums and the sheikh answered:

A woman is allowed to participate as long as she restricts herself to the following:

1- Her participation should only be minimal; to ask her question or topic and leave. She should not comment unnecessarily because the aim is to keep her safe from talking to men and mixing with them.

2- Her writing should not contain anything that would incite a fitnah (prelude to sin), such as joking, writing flirtatiously or laughing as in LOOOL, or the use of  emotion-showing symbols like smiling faces because that will lead to rouse the greed of sick hearts (sick as in bad not ill).And then he gives an extract from the Quran meaning {O Consorts of the Prophet! ye are not like any of the (other) women: if ye do fear (Allah) be not too complaisant of speech lest one in whose heart is a disease should be moved with desire: but speak ye a speech that is just} Al Ahzab/32

3- She should avoid giving out her Email or privately messaging a man even if it is for help because this messaging will most likely cause fitnah and hearts to connect.

4- Most importantly and better is for a woman to only participate in women only forums because that is safer for her. And these forums are now many and they are full of good and richness. And if she needs to participate in general forums it would be best if she used a username that does not show that she is female. And Allah is more knowledgeable.  

The comments on this article were 380 and some women replied with a long Arabic LOL in defiance and others expressed their disappointment in Turki Al Dakheel for taking a shiekh’s fatwa lightly.

And this distortion of women’s humanity goes beyond borders in many Saudi men’s heads. A Saudi acquaintance of mine told me that he always thought that the ex in ex-girlfriend stood for extended as in western women are so cheap that it is ok for them  to be one of many girlfriends of one guy. I don’t know how he could have missed the exs in ex-boyfriend, ex-wife and ex-husband. Maybe his wishful thinking blocked them out on a subconscious level.

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