December 15, 2008 · 5:44 am

A picture that’s worth a thousand words

Iraq Bush

Yesterday during a press conference with Bush in Baghdad a journalist threw his shoes at Bush’s head. According to eyewitnesses, he stood up about 12 feet from Bush and shouted in Arabic: “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” He then threw a shoe at Bush, who ducked and narrowly avoided it. And then he threw his other shoe, shouting in Arabic, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” Bush reportedly tried to brush off the incident telling people that that is true democracy when anyone can draw attention to themselves but he was obviously shaken. Here’s the video of what happened:

 

In Arab culture throwing a shoe at someone is the ultimate insult. If a person just shows the bottom of his shoes when crossing their legs, you can be sure that they have little respect for the person in front of them. So to have the shoe taken off and thrown at someone’s head is definitely big.  

I’m not gong to parade my ignorance of the situation in Iraq. I don’t know much about the details but I do know that there is a lot of sectarian violence and fighting between the Sunnis and the Shia. And Bush did the world a tremendous favor by getting rid of Saddam. There’s an Arabic saying that only what’s truly right is right to do. So he can’t go liberate a country from its dictator, especially based on false allegations and for personal gain, in the name of righteousness while there’s a much bigger injustice that he’s sponsoring in the very same neighborhood. How can he give that whole cowboy hero act in the Middle East and then with a straight face talk about supporting Israel in it’s occupation of Palestine? The whole Middle East would much rather see Israel gone than Saddam and that would eliminate Muslim terrorism like nothing else. Israel’s occupancy of Palestine is the fountain source that all Muslim terrorists use to recruit. To Arabs he just looks like a two-faced hypocrite and I’m glad he’s leaving office.  

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Filed under Culture, Palestinian/ Israel conflict, Personal favorites, Regional and International

December 14, 2008 · 6:22 am

Somebody do something!

I came across this ad on expatriates.com offering a 2 year old girl for adoption. I called the local police station and they don’t answer and then I called the Ministry of Social Affairs and a man working in the orphanage department told me that he can’t do anything unless I send an official fax from my workplace! He won’t even take the link to read it for himself.

This is the link to the ad: http://www.expatriates.com/cls/3950834.html

And just in case it gets taken down before you see it here’s a  copy:

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December 13, 2008 · 12:00 am

Foiled Kidnapping

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Last week a five year old girl and her mother got a lucky break when a Saudi man, Ali Al Shammari, was able to rescue the girl from an attempted kidnapping. It all happened when the widowed mother went to a charity center to get a Eid holiday give-out. She had taken her daughter along. After getting the packages, the mother stopped a taxi and helped the daughter into the back seat. She then turned around to get the bags from the sidewalk. As soon as she turned her back, the driver shut the door and sped off with the five year old still in the backseat. The mother ran after the taxi screaming “my daughter, my daughter, the taxi driver took my daughter!” This Saudi man was in his car nearby and heard her. He immediately raced after the taxi until he was able to corner it and get back the girl who was pleading with the driver to return her to her mother

Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh awarded the man an undisclosed cash reward for his heroic deed. And the newspaper took an interesting perspective on the whole story, writing that this is just another reason to nationalize all taxis, as if kidnapping and all things bad are only done by expatriates. I’m all for nationalizing every job but not for this reason

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December 5, 2008 · 2:37 am

Prominent Saudis: Rania Al Baz

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Rania Al Baz might be a prominent Saudi but is far from liked by Saudis. She used to work as a presenter on the Saudi national channel. In April 2004 she was seriously beaten up by her husband. After a photo of the aftermath was published in local media, sympathy came pouring in. Her hospital bill was taken care of by a member of the royal family. Her husband was duly punished and she was granted custody of her two sons. She also has a daughter from a previous marriage. There were people who raised doubts about why her husband got that angry in the first place. There were even rumors that she was on the phone flirting with another man when her husband came in. Lucky for Rania, the husband lost a lot of his credibility when he shot at his sister in Egypt and then kidnapped her in Lebanon for singing. This is a video of an interview that the couple did on an MBC program soon after the beating.

 Rania made a full recovery. She then was given jobs on Al Arabiya and then on the Lebanese channel Future TV. She lost some of her Saudi backing and fans when she decided to appear publicly without a headscarf. But generally she was on the right track up until her Oprah interview.  On that show Oprah interviewed women from all over the world, all of them positive representatives of their countries except for Rania. Everyone back here was justifiably offended. Why couldn’t they have chosen someone else; Mona Abu Sulieman, Dr. Salwa Al Hazza, Lubna Olayan, Dr. Maha Al-Mounif, Rusha Al Hoshan…etc. It’s like bringing in Natascha Kampusch to represent all Austrian women. Anyway if you want a complete rant on the topic, read this post.

If Rania had condemned the Oprah episode, then she could have gained back a little of what was lost. Even the journalist who arranged the interview was unhappy about how it was edited. Rania on the other hand issued a statement to local press that she was satisfied with the show and that Saudis should not be so sensitive. That coupled with a memoir, originally published in French, which portrayed her whole life in Saudi Arabia as one great big tragedy really pushed Saudis away. It seems as if she used her calamity as a ticket to victim-hood fame. If she had truly cared about the plight of Saudi domestic violence victims, she would have written her memoirs in Arabic rather then French. She could have done more interviews locally rather than joining the rest of the world in their Saudi bashing. Ideally, she could have taken advantage of the initial surge of Saudi support to start a hotline, association, or/and a center. Instead she chose to publicly take off her hijab and to be interviewed reportedly drinking and smoking. Rather than help other Saudi women in her position by raising awareness within the country, Rania willingly and purposely became the global poster-child for anti- Saudi Arabia and anti- Islam.

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December 3, 2008 · 9:35 pm

Making Light of Gender Discrimination

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The Saudi woman cartoon: Please insert one riyal + a letter of permission from your male guardian authenticated by a stamp from his office of employment + 2 photocopies of the family registration card + a certificate of commendable conduct authenticated by the protection of fungal life association + an aerial photo of your house that proves that there is a male guardian living with you + an x-ray of your primary teeth + your Jinn qareen’s birth certificate + the original copy of the bible + 3 feathers from the wings of a gray rooster on the condition that it’s the youngest of it’s siblings + 2 ground cloves (be careful that it’s only 2 … Once you insert the above requirements please be aware that for your OWN BENEFIT a drink will be randomly chosen for your because you could be OVERLY EMOTIONAL in your selection.

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The Saudi man cartoon: please insert your riyal and select your drink.

This cartoon has been making the rounds on Email. I have recieved it twice from two different people. I don’t know where it was originally published.

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November 24, 2008 · 11:18 pm

Religion is morals

This month the Education Ministry instructed all religion teachers to spend five minutes of every class they teach to lecture students on how to dress properly and avoid western clothes. These instructions are strange considering that all Saudi public schools have very strict dress codes that even govern hairstyles. Girls have to wear a uniform inside the school and a tent style abaya with full face cover coming in and going out of the school while boys have to wear thobes (traditional Saudi menswear) and have their hair almost shaved off. And yet this is not enough, what students wear at home and on their own time under their parents’ supervision has to be addressed too!

Another issue that the Ministry has asked all schools to look out for is that some students come to school with pictures on their bags and stationary supplies. The issued warning is ambiguous about the nature of these pictures but for readers of Arabic you would think it was pornography. Actually it’s more in the nature of the wildly popular Disney High School Musical and Hannah Montana characters. These according to the warning are putting our school environment and the whole of society in dire danger. While the schools do their jobs of confiscating pictures and organizing parental awareness programs, the Ministry has promised to take this up with Saudi commerce to stop allowing these pictures into the country.

In all Ministry of Education supervised schools students spend a lot of time on religious studies averaging about 6 to 9 40 minute classes per week, depending on the grade level. What is taught during all that time? Some of it is just reading and memorizing the Quran which I enjoyed as a student since many of the Quran chapters we took were stories about prophets. But many other classes are devoted to abstract and unrelatable concepts especially at the elementary level. And what I mean by abstract is like a whole subject devoted to monotheism that is taught over and over again from first grade up until students graduate. And then there’s Islamic jurisprudence (Fiqh) in which students learn about which kind of lamb should be sacrificed and how to prepare a corpse for burial, all of this in theoretical terms of course and through mostly rote memorization. What am I getting at? It bothers me that all this time at school is spent on such topics that the majority of students will not have to deal with in real life. What is more, the Ministry is willing to push class time for such a superficial issue like how students dress in their own time but at the same time if you visit any school canteen in our kingdom you will find chaos. I have never seen a school canteen where students stand properly in line waiting for their turn.Come in to any school early in the morning and I guarantee that you will catch some students with their notebooks sprawled out copying last night’s homework. Check out all the posters hanging on the walls of the school and you will see that at least 95% of them were not done by the students whose names are shamelessly written on it but actually some Syrian or Egyptian man in a shop was paid to make it. Teaching students to have pride in making things themselves has not quite caught on.

 The Prophet Mohammed PBUH said (Religion is morals) which means that the main manifestation of Islam within a society is how people deal with each other. So why is respecting others by standing in line not assigned five minutes? Why is plagiarism and pride in one’s own work not assigned a chapter? And how about Saudi arrogance, self-righteousness and racism?

 This post was long overdue having gotten myself into numerous verbal clashes at cashiers because people just won’t wait their turn but what really instigated this topic was that my sister’s friend was beaten up badly by a couple of women at a clothing shop, Zara, because she wouldn’t let them cut in. She took this to court but the women just won’t show up and consequently the hearing keeps getting postponed.

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November 15, 2008 · 5:47 am

The Unemployment Rate and Saudi Women

The fifth of November was the deadline for applying for administrative and technical jobs at the new Princess Nora University in Riyadh. There were 218 positions available and the number of applicants was 40000 women and according to the Alwatan news channel the number was closer to 46000. So that is an average of 211 applicants per vacancy! And this is only in Riyadh, although it is the biggest city in the kingdom. Still that is a large number considering the fact that there are over 5 and a half million expatriates in the country, many of whom were brought in to do the very same kind of jobs these unfortunate women applied for. So many women looking for jobs that exist but are out of their reach because of numerous issues. Some of these issues are:

  • One important problem is that expatriates are willing to do these very same jobs for a lot less and for longer hours.
  • Gender also plays a major role since segregation is imposed on almost all sectors.
  • The women might have the right credentials on paper but when you come right down to it they aren’t trained at all. To illustrate I will tell you of three incidents of many that I have come across. The first was concerning a newly appointed computer engineer at one of my workplaces. She was Saudi and had just graduated from a five year program from a major Saudi university. She did not know how to hook up a printer to a computer and had to have a secretary show her. Another very common issue is with the Saudi English teachers at our schools. There are so many times that I have come across quizzes and exams where I had to first correct the questions because they were so full of grammatical and spelling mistakes before I could look at how the students performed. And don’t ever bother asking a Saudi librarian for help, she’s probably just as lost as you are if not more so. Why is this? Because at many of our educational institutes, we only go through the act of teaching and not really teach and train our students for the real world. Unlike the other issues, this problem is being addressed currently and many of these institutes are going through significant changes for the better.
  • We have an overwhelming epidemic of passivity. Maybe it is the heat but it is so disheartening to see the number of young men and women who are not passionate about anything. They act like old men and women at a nursing home. All they care about is their immediate comforts, living day to day in a fog of hopelessness. When I ask them why not do this or that they simply shrug their shoulders. In other countries 46000 applying for the same jobs would cause an outrage and people would take to the streets. A craze of patriotism would take over and heads of companies who do not have a substantial number of Saudis on their payrolls would see boycotts of their products…etc.
  • The final problem that faces women here is mobilization. I know that many people especially Saudis say that this is only a superficial symptom and that there is no urgency in addressing it. I say otherwise. Driving and being able to get around is a major obstacle facing thousands if not millions of women all across the country. 46000 women who were able to reach the university to apply, I wonder how many sat at home begging a brother, father or husband to take them.

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November 7, 2008 · 2:04 pm

Prominent Saudis: Princess Nora bint AbdulRahman Al Saud

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Princess Nora is the founder of Saudi Arabia’s sister. She was a year older than him, born in 1875. The photo above is of King Abdulazziz on the right and Prince Saud Al Kabeer (P. Nora’s husband) on the left.

She had great influence on King AbdulAzziz and historians write that she really urged him to leave Kuwait and try to get control of Riyadh. Afterwards she became one of his main advisors and he was famously known to say on several occasions “I’m Nora’s brother”. King Abdulazziz also gave his sister a role in raising his sons; whenever anyone of them did anything wrong as a child he would send them to their aunt for discipline. Dame Violet Dickson on meeting Princess Nora stated that she was one of the most important personalities of the Arabian Gulf and commented on how charismatic she was. John Philby was also impressed by the princess and commented that she was the first lady of her country.

She was known to be quite progressive and outspoken. When the telephone first came into the country many Islamic purists thought it was a tool of the devil but she supported its installation and told the people that it was an amazing device that they will not be able to live without. She was also a poet and had written several poems, the most famous of which is the one she wrote when her husband left her behind for travel. Princess Nora passed away in 1950.

A few weeks ago King Abdullah honored his aunt’s memory by naming the first university in Saudi Arabia for women only Princess Nora bint Abdulrahman University for Women.

This is another photo but it isn’t of Princess Nora but I still imagine it isn’t far off from what she would have dressed like. This is of Fatima Al Zamil who ruled Hail (a province north west of Riyadh) from 1911 to 1914. The photo was taken by Gertrude Bell.  

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November 5, 2008 · 4:41 pm

No Need for a Hunger Strike

From the first time I read about the hunger strike a group of Saudis were planning I thought who are they kidding they could starve themselves for a month without anyting happening except maybe having their first meal after the strike in prison.

I saw this video on Ahmed Al Omran’s Saudijeans blog and the first person I thought of was Matrook Al Faleh. Inshallah since Obama and Biden have been elected he will soon be freed. Since he represents exactly what Biden was talking about.  

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November 5, 2008 · 9:05 am

It’s Too Good To Be True

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Barack Obama will be the next president of the USA. I know most people around the world are tired of the American elections and there is a sense of weariness because we all thought that it would be like four years ago when the world set their hopes on John Kerry (anyone but Bush thing) and Americans let them down. When I woke up this morning and turned the TV on just when they were announcing Obama coming out on the stage as president-elect, I was shocked and elated. This is definitely going to be a good day. Besides what it means politically both for Americans and the world, this has cultural and ideological meaning for everyone. In Saudi Arabia, people look to the USA as a center of education and progress so when President Clinton got caught with Lewinsky, it had a ripple effect here. People got the message that after all that education and power it all came down to sex. And there was a this wave of womanizing and I believe many upper-middle class men took on second wives because of that negative influence. Then when Bush got elected for a second term after his foreign policy failures, many here thought well the west is definitely just a bunch of racist colonialist crusaders at heart. By voting for Bush they sent the message that there was no remorse for all those tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, for the unAmericanness of Guantanamo Bay and all those dead Iraqi women and children. Some put it down to that lives that are non-white and non Christian had little value to the US. And a sense of bitterness and disappointment in the so-called American values and principles unfurled and suffocated any popularity that the US had pre-Iraq.

Now with Obama elected, no matter what he does in the future I know that racial tensions everywhere have been subdued a little. His background; the time he spent in Muslim Indonesia as a child and his Islamic heritage on his father’s side coupled with his mixed race and his choice of an African American as a spouse is beautiful. Him winning tells humanity that dignity, self-respect, hard-work and qualifications still count and that even though the bumbling fool Bush dubiously won in the beginning, he definitely is not better off for it.

As for what it means for Saudis, it is a cultural shift in the right direction. Saudi did not really believe in the American version of democracy. How could they when all the presidents of the so-called” melting pot” were Anglo. Now they are rubbing their eyes in disbelief rethinking the concept in a way that hopefully will move them out of their passiveness and no point attitude. Tribal differences will matter a little less now. Yes that is how much weight American elections have around the world.      

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