Kaelen Wilson- Goldie reviews Arabic fiction’s latest succès de scandale.
The Others
Siba al Harez
Telegram Books
Dh68
“What is so frightening, from the start, about our being different?” asks the unnamed narrator of Siba al Harez’s debut novel, The Others. “Is it because we form a storm of question marks, moving fiercely through an undistinguished and previously unnoticed space in this nation, that never before experienced the essence or function of questioning, or of being in a state of difference? Is it because we release an intensity of presence that remains unacknowledged on the map of the world, or between the thighs of a recognised tribe?”
According to her publishers, Siba al Harez is the pseudonym of a 26-year-old woman from Al Qatif in Saudi Arabia. The Others was originally published in Arabic in 2006 and – thanks in part to its transgressive subject matter, including lesbian relationships and sadistic behaviour – quickly rode waves of controversy onto the bestseller lists. The English translation, published this month by Telegram Books in London, comes after a spate of similarly explicit novels, from the first two instalments of Turki al Hamad’s coming-of-age trilogy (also set in Saudi Arabia) to Nedjma’s The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman (another pseudonymous effort by a writer living in the Maghreb) and Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh. But while some of those books suffer self-congratulatory prurience or simply bad writing, The Others signals the arrival of a serious prose stylist.
The otherness announced in the novel’s name, and the difference about which the narrator speaks, has little to do with sexual orientation. The real condition of otherness and difference at stake is religious. Like the author, the narrator comes from Al Qatif, a coastal oasis in Saudi Arabia’s predominantly Shiite Eastern Province. In 1979, a violent rebellion broke out there, inspired in part by the revolution in Iran. Tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets, and the ensuing confrontation with the security services left close to 20 demonstrators dead, many of them young activists who had been demanding an end to their political and economic marginalisation.
The conflict in Al Qatif cuts across The Others like a scar. Among other things, it resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of the narrator’s father, who had already been absent most of her life. She seeks refuge in the Hussainiyya, where she organises activities for Ramadan and Ashura. She writes for a religious magazine that is distributed in secret, her meetings with editors murmured, her articles coded on compact discs.
Siba al Harez writes of the body, and its architecture of desire, in a manner that recalls the work of the American novelist Nicole Krauss. The Others opens in the narrator’s voice: “And so there was a long line of them, and I admitted them all. I let them come in through my front door. It was the front door of me, and I, for my part, was about to become something new: an occasion for entertainment, a spectacle.” What follows is a vivid account of the narrator’s affair with her classmate Dai, beautiful, cryptic, violent.
But the relationship cracks under the weight of jealousy, betrayal and the narrator’s inexperience, combined with her mounting curiosity about other women, and men. Turning her back on Dai, she moves on to Dareen, and Rayyan, a young man with whom she pursues a virtual, online-only affair, and Umar, who provides the novel’s unexpectedly conventional endpoint.
In between these dalliances, the narrator peels back the many layers of her otherness: her identity, her age (those toxic teenage years), her illness (epilepsy, which drastically reduces her prospects for marriage and employment), the absence of her father, the mysterious death of her brother, the things mark her as a maskh, “this freak, this deformed creature, this monster”.
In Harez’s rumination on the theme, otherness runs deeper than membership of a social or political minority. It is the experience of being alienated from another, even from the intimacy of one’s partner, to the extent that one becomes a stranger to oneself.
The Others will inevitably be packaged and sold as a novel about sex, particularly in the West. But it should be read as more than that, for it is at its most radical not when the plot dives under the sheets but rather when the author calls attention to the delineation of difference, in the physical body, but moreover, in the body politic.
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie is a staff writer at The Review.
Reproduced from The National: The loves of others
Showing posts with label Saudi Arabia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Saudi Arabia. Show all posts
Friday, 13 November 2009
Thursday, 1 October 2009
Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Changes and Contradictions
Naomi Sakr
My aim here – Naomi Sakr writes – is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists.
This paper was presented by the author at the Conference “The East and the West: Women in the eyes of the media”, organised by Resetdoc and held in Doha on April 19th 2009. It is based on the author’s much longer research article, ‘Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric, Reductionism and Realities’, published in the December 2008 issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 35, No 3, pp 385-404.
The government of Saudi Arabia has introduced numerous internal economic and political reforms in recent years. Any account of these reforms should acknowledge that they started in the 1990s and therefore predated both the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the international pressure that the attacks triggered for Saudi Arabia to initiate social reforms. Although the changes discussed in this article took place in 2004-06, it is important to understand them in the context of a much longer history of change – one that goes back several decades. Since the focus here is on media, there may be no call to look back much further than the start of television in the kingdom in the 1960s. But, since the focus is also on women, it is relevant to note that Saudi Arabia signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 2000. The government placed multiple reservations on its adherence to the convention. The crucial factor, however, is that it signed the convention for reasons that seemed to be related to a bid for increased foreign investment and membership of the World Trade Organization and had nothing to do with external pressures experienced in the wake of 9/11.
It is also necessary to recognize that Saudi Arabian public discourse on the issue of women's status is full of contradictions. On one hand official rhetoric talks of 'women's nature' as if this 'nature' imposes self-explanatory restrictions on what women may do and where they may go. On the other, there have been some big changes in government policies on women's education, employment and legal standing. Professions and university courses that were once barred to women have been opened up. Women have been authorized to apply for identity cards without a male guardian's consent. In 2005, they were promised the vote in municipal elections that were due to take place in 2009 but were postponed. Contradictions are interesting because they indicate that there is intrinsic pressure for renegotiation. Several scholars have picked up on this point, showing how the contradictions between official discourse about women and practical realities have direct ramifications for Saudi women in their everyday lives. An extreme example was the fire at a girls’ school in Makkah in 2002. Fifteen girls died in that fire. Families of the victims blamed the religious police for obstructing evacuation because of rules about contact with uncovered females. After the deaths, responsibility for girls' education was transferred from religious clerics to the Ministry of Education.
My aim here is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists. This contradiction can help to account for pressures to renegotiate the status of female journalists. At the same time, the contradiction itself merits an explanation, which my presentation will attempt to give. However, before setting out the evidence, three background observations are in order. The first is that women’s visibility in the media does not necessarily tell us much about their status in other areas of public life. For example, Egypt - despite having a large number of female presenters in radio and television - has very few women in parliament.
The second is that public discourse in Saudi Arabia is based almost exclusively on references to Islam and such references are inevitably historically specific. That is to say: people in power interpret Islam differently in different times and places. For instance, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran reversed his position on women’s political rights. In 1962 he said it was against Islam for women to vote. In 1979 he said Muslim women had a duty to intervene in politics. Saudi Arabia has also seen revisions. In 1979 protestors laid siege to the Grand Mosque in Makkah, alleging moral degeneracy among the kingdom’s political leaders. The government responded with what Saudi women media veterans describe as a wave of ‘anti-women’ activity, which included removing women from many types of television programme and enforcing strict segregation in public places. This reaction conformed to what often occurs when certain interest groups need to put on a show of unity. They do so by pressurising the less powerful to abide by norms legitimized by reference to ‘tradition’. In this case 'tradition' is equated with Islam. Yet, as the scholar Hannah Papanek has noted, so-called traditions may be concocted by the already powerful from their own particular visions of the past and hopes for future power.
The third background observation relates to ways of evaluating change in media portrayals of women. The question of how to approach such an evaluation may appear very challenging when portrayals are highly contradictory. The 2005 edition of the Arab Human Development Report, subtitled The Rise of Women in the Arab World, concluded that: 'Contradiction is the outstanding characteristic of images of Arab women in the media as in society itself'. Widely differing images of women appear across all types of programmes on Saudi-owned television channels, including MBC, Rotana, Al-Risalah and Al-Majd. Because meanings are not fixed, no-one really knows how individual viewers interpret the diverse portrayals they see in the media. On the other hand, the more diverse the portrayals, the more scope there is for diverse interpretations. This implies that, instead of trying to evaluate portrayals in terms of whether they are ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ women, they can be evaluated in terms of the extent of diversity. When the diversity of characters and narratives increases, in both factual and fictional media content, the range of reference points also increases for discussion of issues relating to women’s status.
Moving now to evidence of women’s visibility in Saudi media over the period 2004-06, the choice of this three-year period is corroborated by an article published in the Saudi liberal online publication Elaph in June 2006. The author of that article declared that there had been a huge transformation of the Saudi media in the past two years. He wrote: ‘women are now appearing daily on the front pages of all eight official newspapers which had previously been monopolized by men’ and ‘official television channels, which had once minimized the presence of women in newscasts and other programmes have been turned into advocates for an invasion (iqtiham) of the media by Saudi women'. For many Saudis, the logical response to this alleged “transformation” was to point out that it was only a transformation in relation to the preceding quarter of a century. A comparison with the situation before 1979 might not have been so startling. For example, in the 1970s people used to watch open-air cinema in Saudi Arabia in mixed company. After the end of the 1970s they could not.
Source: ResetDoc, Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Changes and Contradictions
My aim here – Naomi Sakr writes – is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists.
This paper was presented by the author at the Conference “The East and the West: Women in the eyes of the media”, organised by Resetdoc and held in Doha on April 19th 2009. It is based on the author’s much longer research article, ‘Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric, Reductionism and Realities’, published in the December 2008 issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 35, No 3, pp 385-404.
The government of Saudi Arabia has introduced numerous internal economic and political reforms in recent years. Any account of these reforms should acknowledge that they started in the 1990s and therefore predated both the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the international pressure that the attacks triggered for Saudi Arabia to initiate social reforms. Although the changes discussed in this article took place in 2004-06, it is important to understand them in the context of a much longer history of change – one that goes back several decades. Since the focus here is on media, there may be no call to look back much further than the start of television in the kingdom in the 1960s. But, since the focus is also on women, it is relevant to note that Saudi Arabia signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 2000. The government placed multiple reservations on its adherence to the convention. The crucial factor, however, is that it signed the convention for reasons that seemed to be related to a bid for increased foreign investment and membership of the World Trade Organization and had nothing to do with external pressures experienced in the wake of 9/11.
It is also necessary to recognize that Saudi Arabian public discourse on the issue of women's status is full of contradictions. On one hand official rhetoric talks of 'women's nature' as if this 'nature' imposes self-explanatory restrictions on what women may do and where they may go. On the other, there have been some big changes in government policies on women's education, employment and legal standing. Professions and university courses that were once barred to women have been opened up. Women have been authorized to apply for identity cards without a male guardian's consent. In 2005, they were promised the vote in municipal elections that were due to take place in 2009 but were postponed. Contradictions are interesting because they indicate that there is intrinsic pressure for renegotiation. Several scholars have picked up on this point, showing how the contradictions between official discourse about women and practical realities have direct ramifications for Saudi women in their everyday lives. An extreme example was the fire at a girls’ school in Makkah in 2002. Fifteen girls died in that fire. Families of the victims blamed the religious police for obstructing evacuation because of rules about contact with uncovered females. After the deaths, responsibility for girls' education was transferred from religious clerics to the Ministry of Education.
My aim here is to assess how far women's personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists. This contradiction can help to account for pressures to renegotiate the status of female journalists. At the same time, the contradiction itself merits an explanation, which my presentation will attempt to give. However, before setting out the evidence, three background observations are in order. The first is that women’s visibility in the media does not necessarily tell us much about their status in other areas of public life. For example, Egypt - despite having a large number of female presenters in radio and television - has very few women in parliament.
The second is that public discourse in Saudi Arabia is based almost exclusively on references to Islam and such references are inevitably historically specific. That is to say: people in power interpret Islam differently in different times and places. For instance, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran reversed his position on women’s political rights. In 1962 he said it was against Islam for women to vote. In 1979 he said Muslim women had a duty to intervene in politics. Saudi Arabia has also seen revisions. In 1979 protestors laid siege to the Grand Mosque in Makkah, alleging moral degeneracy among the kingdom’s political leaders. The government responded with what Saudi women media veterans describe as a wave of ‘anti-women’ activity, which included removing women from many types of television programme and enforcing strict segregation in public places. This reaction conformed to what often occurs when certain interest groups need to put on a show of unity. They do so by pressurising the less powerful to abide by norms legitimized by reference to ‘tradition’. In this case 'tradition' is equated with Islam. Yet, as the scholar Hannah Papanek has noted, so-called traditions may be concocted by the already powerful from their own particular visions of the past and hopes for future power.
The third background observation relates to ways of evaluating change in media portrayals of women. The question of how to approach such an evaluation may appear very challenging when portrayals are highly contradictory. The 2005 edition of the Arab Human Development Report, subtitled The Rise of Women in the Arab World, concluded that: 'Contradiction is the outstanding characteristic of images of Arab women in the media as in society itself'. Widely differing images of women appear across all types of programmes on Saudi-owned television channels, including MBC, Rotana, Al-Risalah and Al-Majd. Because meanings are not fixed, no-one really knows how individual viewers interpret the diverse portrayals they see in the media. On the other hand, the more diverse the portrayals, the more scope there is for diverse interpretations. This implies that, instead of trying to evaluate portrayals in terms of whether they are ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ women, they can be evaluated in terms of the extent of diversity. When the diversity of characters and narratives increases, in both factual and fictional media content, the range of reference points also increases for discussion of issues relating to women’s status.
Moving now to evidence of women’s visibility in Saudi media over the period 2004-06, the choice of this three-year period is corroborated by an article published in the Saudi liberal online publication Elaph in June 2006. The author of that article declared that there had been a huge transformation of the Saudi media in the past two years. He wrote: ‘women are now appearing daily on the front pages of all eight official newspapers which had previously been monopolized by men’ and ‘official television channels, which had once minimized the presence of women in newscasts and other programmes have been turned into advocates for an invasion (iqtiham) of the media by Saudi women'. For many Saudis, the logical response to this alleged “transformation” was to point out that it was only a transformation in relation to the preceding quarter of a century. A comparison with the situation before 1979 might not have been so startling. For example, in the 1970s people used to watch open-air cinema in Saudi Arabia in mixed company. After the end of the 1970s they could not.
Source: ResetDoc, Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Changes and Contradictions
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
A worrying Saudi backslide
By Ian Bremmer
On Friday, Saudis will celebrate the 85th birthday of Abdullah bin Abd Al-Aziz. On Sunday, they'll mark the fourth anniversary of the day he became king. For those inside and outside the kingdom hoping for deeper and broader political and social liberalization, Abdullah's reign has always been a good news/bad news story. The good news: reform has made progress. He has actively promoted "brotherly dialogue" with Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, and other religious leaders. Media criticism of government and of the kingdom's religious conservatism has become much more commonplace. Several hardliners have been pushed from positions of power within the establishment. Abdullah's reign has encouraged female members of the royal family to campaign openly for greater rights for women, and we've seen the first appointment of a female deputy minister. These achievements haven't come easily and shouldn't be dismissed.
The bad news: reform has moved very, very slowly. The inter-faith dialogue has not created anything approaching religious freedom within the kingdom. Women are still denied rights considered fundamental in other Arab countries. Efforts to rein in the so-called Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a religious militia that uses physical violence to enforce Wahhabi rules of dress and behavior, have produced little progress.
But a pair of recent setbacks suggests the opening of Saudi society may actually be moving from slow speed into reverse. First, despite direct early support from King Abdullah, plans to reopen public movie theaters, banned across the kingdom for the past three decades, have recently been reversed-and a Saudi film festival in Jeddah was abruptly cancelled two weeks ago. Second, the editor of a leading Saudi newspaper was fired in June after a reporter at the paper offended Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-Aziz by appearing to criticize the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
In addition, though there's nothing new about Internet censorship in the kingdom, credible rumors suggest the Saudi government may soon mandate installation of a state-owned computer chip in every Saudi computer, one that would allow authorities to track all Internet activity within the country. As with the controversial Green Dam project in China, the stated purpose would be to crack down on pornography. But, also as in China, the state officials who monitor all this traffic would be unlikely to ignore online content that poses political or social challenges for the House of Saud.
Prince Nayef, Abdullah's half-brother, is the embodiment of the conservative backlash. His clout appears to have grown with his appointment earlier this spring as second deputy prime minister, an innocuous sounding position that some fear may position him to become king following Abdullah's death. This speculation has intensified with doubts over the health of 84-year-old Crown Prince Sultan, the man most likely to replace Abdullah -- if he lives long enough.
These defeats for reform provide an early warning sign of rising levels of dissension within the Saudi elite -- and possibly of anxiety among senior members of the royal family as they begin to think more seriously about the eventual succession process.
In the near term, infighting could undermine the ongoing effort to diversify the Saudi economy -- as well as the political and social reform process. Longer-term, if Sultan dies before Abdullah, champions of reform inside and outside the kingdom will worry more openly that Nayef might one day become Saudi Arabia's king.
HASSAN AMMAR/AFP/Getty Images
On Friday, Saudis will celebrate the 85th birthday of Abdullah bin Abd Al-Aziz. On Sunday, they'll mark the fourth anniversary of the day he became king. For those inside and outside the kingdom hoping for deeper and broader political and social liberalization, Abdullah's reign has always been a good news/bad news story. The good news: reform has made progress. He has actively promoted "brotherly dialogue" with Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, and other religious leaders. Media criticism of government and of the kingdom's religious conservatism has become much more commonplace. Several hardliners have been pushed from positions of power within the establishment. Abdullah's reign has encouraged female members of the royal family to campaign openly for greater rights for women, and we've seen the first appointment of a female deputy minister. These achievements haven't come easily and shouldn't be dismissed.
The bad news: reform has moved very, very slowly. The inter-faith dialogue has not created anything approaching religious freedom within the kingdom. Women are still denied rights considered fundamental in other Arab countries. Efforts to rein in the so-called Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a religious militia that uses physical violence to enforce Wahhabi rules of dress and behavior, have produced little progress.
But a pair of recent setbacks suggests the opening of Saudi society may actually be moving from slow speed into reverse. First, despite direct early support from King Abdullah, plans to reopen public movie theaters, banned across the kingdom for the past three decades, have recently been reversed-and a Saudi film festival in Jeddah was abruptly cancelled two weeks ago. Second, the editor of a leading Saudi newspaper was fired in June after a reporter at the paper offended Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-Aziz by appearing to criticize the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
In addition, though there's nothing new about Internet censorship in the kingdom, credible rumors suggest the Saudi government may soon mandate installation of a state-owned computer chip in every Saudi computer, one that would allow authorities to track all Internet activity within the country. As with the controversial Green Dam project in China, the stated purpose would be to crack down on pornography. But, also as in China, the state officials who monitor all this traffic would be unlikely to ignore online content that poses political or social challenges for the House of Saud.
Prince Nayef, Abdullah's half-brother, is the embodiment of the conservative backlash. His clout appears to have grown with his appointment earlier this spring as second deputy prime minister, an innocuous sounding position that some fear may position him to become king following Abdullah's death. This speculation has intensified with doubts over the health of 84-year-old Crown Prince Sultan, the man most likely to replace Abdullah -- if he lives long enough.
These defeats for reform provide an early warning sign of rising levels of dissension within the Saudi elite -- and possibly of anxiety among senior members of the royal family as they begin to think more seriously about the eventual succession process.
In the near term, infighting could undermine the ongoing effort to diversify the Saudi economy -- as well as the political and social reform process. Longer-term, if Sultan dies before Abdullah, champions of reform inside and outside the kingdom will worry more openly that Nayef might one day become Saudi Arabia's king.
HASSAN AMMAR/AFP/Getty Images
A worrying Saudi backslide
By Ian Bremmer
On Friday, Saudis will celebrate the 85th birthday of Abdullah bin Abd Al-Aziz. On Sunday, they'll mark the fourth anniversary of the day he became king. For those inside and outside the kingdom hoping for deeper and broader political and social liberalization, Abdullah's reign has always been a good news/bad news story. The good news: reform has made progress. He has actively promoted "brotherly dialogue" with Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, and other religious leaders. Media criticism of government and of the kingdom's religious conservatism has become much more commonplace. Several hardliners have been pushed from positions of power within the establishment. Abdullah's reign has encouraged female members of the royal family to campaign openly for greater rights for women, and we've seen the first appointment of a female deputy minister. These achievements haven't come easily and shouldn't be dismissed.
The bad news: reform has moved very, very slowly. The inter-faith dialogue has not created anything approaching religious freedom within the kingdom. Women are still denied rights considered fundamental in other Arab countries. Efforts to rein in the so-called Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a religious militia that uses physical violence to enforce Wahhabi rules of dress and behavior, have produced little progress.
But a pair of recent setbacks suggests the opening of Saudi society may actually be moving from slow speed into reverse. First, despite direct early support from King Abdullah, plans to reopen public movie theaters, banned across the kingdom for the past three decades, have recently been reversed-and a Saudi film festival in Jeddah was abruptly cancelled two weeks ago. Second, the editor of a leading Saudi newspaper was fired in June after a reporter at the paper offended Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-Aziz by appearing to criticize the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
In addition, though there's nothing new about Internet censorship in the kingdom, credible rumors suggest the Saudi government may soon mandate installation of a state-owned computer chip in every Saudi computer, one that would allow authorities to track all Internet activity within the country. As with the controversial Green Dam project in China, the stated purpose would be to crack down on pornography. But, also as in China, the state officials who monitor all this traffic would be unlikely to ignore online content that poses political or social challenges for the House of Saud.
Prince Nayef, Abdullah's half-brother, is the embodiment of the conservative backlash. His clout appears to have grown with his appointment earlier this spring as second deputy prime minister, an innocuous sounding position that some fear may position him to become king following Abdullah's death. This speculation has intensified with doubts over the health of 84-year-old Crown Prince Sultan, the man most likely to replace Abdullah -- if he lives long enough.
These defeats for reform provide an early warning sign of rising levels of dissension within the Saudi elite -- and possibly of anxiety among senior members of the royal family as they begin to think more seriously about the eventual succession process.
In the near term, infighting could undermine the ongoing effort to diversify the Saudi economy -- as well as the political and social reform process. Longer-term, if Sultan dies before Abdullah, champions of reform inside and outside the kingdom will worry more openly that Nayef might one day become Saudi Arabia's king.
HASSAN AMMAR/AFP/Getty Images
On Friday, Saudis will celebrate the 85th birthday of Abdullah bin Abd Al-Aziz. On Sunday, they'll mark the fourth anniversary of the day he became king. For those inside and outside the kingdom hoping for deeper and broader political and social liberalization, Abdullah's reign has always been a good news/bad news story. The good news: reform has made progress. He has actively promoted "brotherly dialogue" with Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Confucian, and other religious leaders. Media criticism of government and of the kingdom's religious conservatism has become much more commonplace. Several hardliners have been pushed from positions of power within the establishment. Abdullah's reign has encouraged female members of the royal family to campaign openly for greater rights for women, and we've seen the first appointment of a female deputy minister. These achievements haven't come easily and shouldn't be dismissed.
The bad news: reform has moved very, very slowly. The inter-faith dialogue has not created anything approaching religious freedom within the kingdom. Women are still denied rights considered fundamental in other Arab countries. Efforts to rein in the so-called Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a religious militia that uses physical violence to enforce Wahhabi rules of dress and behavior, have produced little progress.
But a pair of recent setbacks suggests the opening of Saudi society may actually be moving from slow speed into reverse. First, despite direct early support from King Abdullah, plans to reopen public movie theaters, banned across the kingdom for the past three decades, have recently been reversed-and a Saudi film festival in Jeddah was abruptly cancelled two weeks ago. Second, the editor of a leading Saudi newspaper was fired in June after a reporter at the paper offended Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-Aziz by appearing to criticize the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.
In addition, though there's nothing new about Internet censorship in the kingdom, credible rumors suggest the Saudi government may soon mandate installation of a state-owned computer chip in every Saudi computer, one that would allow authorities to track all Internet activity within the country. As with the controversial Green Dam project in China, the stated purpose would be to crack down on pornography. But, also as in China, the state officials who monitor all this traffic would be unlikely to ignore online content that poses political or social challenges for the House of Saud.
Prince Nayef, Abdullah's half-brother, is the embodiment of the conservative backlash. His clout appears to have grown with his appointment earlier this spring as second deputy prime minister, an innocuous sounding position that some fear may position him to become king following Abdullah's death. This speculation has intensified with doubts over the health of 84-year-old Crown Prince Sultan, the man most likely to replace Abdullah -- if he lives long enough.
These defeats for reform provide an early warning sign of rising levels of dissension within the Saudi elite -- and possibly of anxiety among senior members of the royal family as they begin to think more seriously about the eventual succession process.
In the near term, infighting could undermine the ongoing effort to diversify the Saudi economy -- as well as the political and social reform process. Longer-term, if Sultan dies before Abdullah, champions of reform inside and outside the kingdom will worry more openly that Nayef might one day become Saudi Arabia's king.
HASSAN AMMAR/AFP/Getty Images
Monday, 20 July 2009
Saudi film festival is cancelled in state crackdown on culture
By Souhail Karam, Reuters, in Riyadh
Saudi Arabia's only film festival has been cancelled, dealing a blow to reformist hopes of an easing of clerical control over culture that was raised by the low-key return of cinemas in December.
In a country where cinemas were banned for almost three decades, the Jeddah Film Festival has since 2006 presented aspiring Saudi film-makers and actors with a rare opportunity to mingle with more experienced peers from other countries. On the eve of the festival, Mamdouh Salem, one of the festival's organisers, received a call. He said: "The governorate of Jeddah notified us of the festival's cancellation after it received instructions from official parties. We were not told why."
Abdullah al-Alami, a Saudi writer, said he was not sure why the fourth Jeddah festival, expected to start in the Islamic kingdom's most liberal city this weekend, was cancelled.
"However, there is a trend of attacking cultural festivities," he added. "This is a dark day for art and literature in our modern history." King Abdullah has tried cautious reforms in the kingdom, a US ally which has no elected parliament, but diplomats say he is facing resistance from conservatives opposing changes.
Many Saudi religious conservatives believe films from more liberal Arab countries such as Egypt could violate religious taboos. Some also view cinema and acting as a form of dissembling inconsistent with Islam.
"The film festival was cancelled upon indirect instructions from the interior ministry," said an official at the information and culture ministry.
Cinema made a low-key return in December with the showing in Jeddah and another southern city of the Saudi comedy Menahi. The film, produced by a company owned by King Abdullah's nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, attracted such large numbers that it had to be screened up to eight times a day. It was shown before mixed audiences, a rare thing to happen in a country that bans unrelated men and women from mixing.
But there was a sharp reaction from Ibrahim al-Ghaith, the former head of the kingdom's religious police, which showed the opposition from hard-liners to efforts to open up the society. He said cinema was an evil, although he eased his tone 24 hours later to say cinemas should show good things and not violate teachings of Islam.
In February, King Abdullah removed Mr Ghaith and another influential cleric in a wide government reshuffle. However, when the film came to the the more conservative capital, Riyadh, local newspapers reported that conservative Saudis, including volunteers with the religious police, tried to disturb the screening. The Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, later signalled his backing for the religious police saying they were on a par with the security forces.
Prince Alwaleeed was undettered. His company, Rotana, boldly put itself up as the main sponsor of the Jeddah festival, donating proceeds from his film. The week-long festival was to have featured a competition between eight feature films made in the Gulf – two from Saudi Arabia itself – and show dozens more shorts by local and regional film-makers.
Saudi Arabia's only film festival has been cancelled, dealing a blow to reformist hopes of an easing of clerical control over culture that was raised by the low-key return of cinemas in December.
In a country where cinemas were banned for almost three decades, the Jeddah Film Festival has since 2006 presented aspiring Saudi film-makers and actors with a rare opportunity to mingle with more experienced peers from other countries. On the eve of the festival, Mamdouh Salem, one of the festival's organisers, received a call. He said: "The governorate of Jeddah notified us of the festival's cancellation after it received instructions from official parties. We were not told why."
Abdullah al-Alami, a Saudi writer, said he was not sure why the fourth Jeddah festival, expected to start in the Islamic kingdom's most liberal city this weekend, was cancelled.
"However, there is a trend of attacking cultural festivities," he added. "This is a dark day for art and literature in our modern history." King Abdullah has tried cautious reforms in the kingdom, a US ally which has no elected parliament, but diplomats say he is facing resistance from conservatives opposing changes.
Many Saudi religious conservatives believe films from more liberal Arab countries such as Egypt could violate religious taboos. Some also view cinema and acting as a form of dissembling inconsistent with Islam.
"The film festival was cancelled upon indirect instructions from the interior ministry," said an official at the information and culture ministry.
Cinema made a low-key return in December with the showing in Jeddah and another southern city of the Saudi comedy Menahi. The film, produced by a company owned by King Abdullah's nephew, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, attracted such large numbers that it had to be screened up to eight times a day. It was shown before mixed audiences, a rare thing to happen in a country that bans unrelated men and women from mixing.
But there was a sharp reaction from Ibrahim al-Ghaith, the former head of the kingdom's religious police, which showed the opposition from hard-liners to efforts to open up the society. He said cinema was an evil, although he eased his tone 24 hours later to say cinemas should show good things and not violate teachings of Islam.
In February, King Abdullah removed Mr Ghaith and another influential cleric in a wide government reshuffle. However, when the film came to the the more conservative capital, Riyadh, local newspapers reported that conservative Saudis, including volunteers with the religious police, tried to disturb the screening. The Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, later signalled his backing for the religious police saying they were on a par with the security forces.
Prince Alwaleeed was undettered. His company, Rotana, boldly put itself up as the main sponsor of the Jeddah festival, donating proceeds from his film. The week-long festival was to have featured a competition between eight feature films made in the Gulf – two from Saudi Arabia itself – and show dozens more shorts by local and regional film-makers.
Tuesday, 17 March 2009
Beyond the book
The demure young woman with her charming manners and friendly smile was something of a shock. Dressed from head to toe in abaya and hijab, surely this could not be Rajaa Alsanea, whose debut novel was banned by her government, denounced in Friday prayers and who received death threats from outraged countrymen for bringing her nation’s women into disrepute.
Surely the author of the 2005 publishing sensation Girls of Riyadh would be some sort of rebel cocking a snook at Saudi Arabia for forcing its women into living a submissive and repressed lifestyle in a male-dominated society.
It is quite the reverse, actually. In a quiet corner of a Dubai hotel, the 27-year-old explained that she loves her country and intends to settle down and live there after she completes her specialist studies in endodontics in America. Another shock. How could the author of a bestseller that is now likely to be made into a movie, not want to be a writer? Why would she want to fix people’s teeth for a living?
“I may be a good writer, but I’m also a very good dentist and that’s what I am going to be. It’s a part of my life that the public don’t know about,” she says, laughing. “I’m getting the highest results in my specialisation, root canals. Dentistry balances my life. Going to work knowing that you’re not famous puts your feet on the ground. Dentistry is my job and writing will always be my passion,” she says firmly, insisting that in her world it is perfectly possible to do both.
Alsanea, whose three older brothers are doctors and whose sister and another brother are orthodontists, studied for her Bachelor of Dentistry at King Saud University in Riyadh before moving to Chicago to do her masters at the University of Illinois. She gained her MSc last year and is now studying for her specialist American Boards degree in endodontics.
“It’s a big thing to get onto the course. I went to Chicago because it’s an excellent dental school and one of my brothers and my sister studied there,” she says with some pride.
She is also working on her second novel and starting to think about a screenplay which she intends to write herself. She is currently considering offers from several film companies and is reluctant simply to turn the project over to somebody else. The prospect of a fat cheque from a big Hollywood studio doesn’t appear to be a factor in her decision-making process. “If I do the movie, I will be writing the screenplay. I am in love with that work. It’s my baby and I don’t want it to be misinterpreted. I haven’t signed anything but it will probably be an American film. It’s a very difficult thing because we don’t have a movie industry in Saudi.”
Writing the screenplay will postpone publication of her second novel, as yet untitled. She says it is a more mature work than her first, which she started writing at the age of 18. “People will definitely have the feeling that I have grown up and matured. I have lived outside my country and experienced a different culture and all of this reflects on the person that I am today. Hopefully, it will be published next year or maybe in two years. Over there [in Chicago], my book has a ‘local author’ sticker on it. People are very proud of me there. They even asked me to do Girls of Chicago,” she says.
As the author of a controversial bestselling first novel, she is much in demand as a speaker at international literary festivals and book fairs all over the world and will speak at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which starts on Saturday. She also spoke at the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature in Dubai last month. Girls of Riyadh tells the stories of four young Saudi women from wealthy families growing up in a closed society.
The book chronicles the love lives of the girls, Gamrah, Lamees, Michelle – who is half Saudi and half American – and Sadeem. It is told in the form of a series of e-mails from an unnamed narrator and describes relationships between young men and women in the conservative Saudi Arabian Islamic culture in a way that had never been dealt with before, touching on tricky subjects such as infidelity, homosexuality and domestic violence.
When it was first published in Beirut in Arabic four years ago, it was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia because of what was seen as inflammatory content. Black-market copies were smuggled into the country and soon the internet was abuzz with excited chatter about the new literary sensation. Alsanea was eventually given permission to publish it in Saudi Arabia and it became a bestseller there. It was translated into English in January 2008.
Safely ensconced in the classrooms of her Chicago dental college, Alsanea was largely but not altogether cushioned from the storm her novel caused back home. “I lost friends over the book. It was sad. The book was banned for six months. My scholarship was threatened. I was mentioned in Friday prayers and you can guess what they were saying. It was not pleasant. I received life-threatening e-mails and letters and it affected my life,” she says.
At the height of the controversy she was receiving more than 1,000 emails a day, which she attempted to answer personally, many supportive but many angry and threatening. A group of furious citizens filed a lawsuit with the Court of Grievances in Riyadh against the Ministry of Information for giving the author permission to distribute the novel and demanding that Alsanea be punished for tarnishing the image of Saudi girls. The court rejected their claims.
Alsanea’s close-knit family backed her fully and she says she would never have dared publish without their support. “You can’t publish in a very conservative country without a circle of protection. One of my brothers suggested that I published under an assumed name but I refused. The good thing was that after the book was published in Lebanon, it was allowed to be sold in my country. With the internet you can’t control censorship. The internet has challenged the myth of censorship,” she says.
She grew up as the youngest of six children in considerable comfort in an upper-middle-class Riyadh family. Her father, a journalist and editor, died when she was eight and her mother encouraged all her children to gain a university education and broaden their horizons. “Ours was a very liberal family and I have always known that I would become a writer. I won my first writing competition in a children’s magazine when I was seven. I don’t remember the subject but I remember the Mickey Mouse watch that I won. At school I was always writing and performing plays, so it wasn’t a huge shock for people when I released the book because they have always known that I had this passion and talent for writing.”
Growing up in a family of doctors and dentists, however, she developed a keen interest in medicine and dentistry. “I grew up thinking that I don’t want to make a living in writing. I thought it would kill it for me and make me less creative. This will put pressure on me when I’m writing and I’m happy with this decision. It’s not the same in the Arab world as it is in the West. In the Arab world writers don’t make a lot of money out of their books.”
An avid reader, Alsanea was always aware that in Saudi Arabia there was very little in the way of novels for young women of her generation.
“There was always a gap between intellectuals and readers, whether it was due to the very sophisticated language used in the books or the fact that young people in Saudi preferred to read blogs. The more sophisticated you sound, the more intellectual you were. That was the attitude. Also novels written in Saudi were mostly written by older male authors.
“I was criticised for using Saudi dialect in the novel but I did that on purpose as I didn’t have that urge to be distant from my readers. I wanted to write a novel that I saw myself in as a young girl in Saudi Arabia. I was also criticised for the title that was very general, but I wanted something that describes many of the different types of women I see on a daily basis in my country.”
People often ask her which one of the four girls, five if you count the narrator, represents herself. They also want to know if she is still friends with the others.
“Actually, there were no girlfriends in real life. It’s all fiction. The stories do happen. These were more than four characters. The stories were gathered from 50 or 100 girls in Saudi. I did put parts of my personality in each one of them and I do relate with the stories that I wrote about. Most girls in Saudi relate to one or other of them. The book is not about a personal experience – it’s about a generation’s experiences.”
Before she was published, Alsanea sent her manuscript to Dr Ghazi al Gosaibi, a prominent liberal author and politician, whose writing she admires. It reached him via a chain of about seven people and one day Alsanea received a phone call from him. “I nearly had a heart attack. He was a very humble and funny kind of a guy. He said he usually has a 40-page test for a book. He called me in 30 minutes saying that I passed the test and he was on page 100. That phone call changed my life for ever. It was a magical moment, a dream come true that your mentor and the writer that you grew up reading read something that you wrote. He got the book exactly the way I wanted people to get it.”
Knowing that she was unlikely to receive permission if she were to submit her manuscript to the Ministry of Information, she contacted a publisher in Beirut. The novel came out in September 2005, three months after Alsanea graduated from dental college. “The day after it was published in Lebanon, I did my first Saudi newspaper interview which tells you how quickly the book reached Saudi. Many others followed and there were days when you could read 10 articles in one newspaper because there was such a debate.”
Despite the controversy her book caused for shining a light on the seamier side of the lives of young Saudis, Alsanea is passionately attached to her culture. She always wears a hijab in public even at university in Chicago, although she doesn’t wear an abaya in the States. In the clinic, she will wear a long-sleeved shirt under her medical scrubs.
“It was an entirely personal decision. It reflects a generation or part of a generation of Muslim girls who are religious but at the same time open-minded and open to other cultures and experiences without losing their religious and Islamic identity.”
When she first went to Chicago, she lived with her brother and sister. This year, for the first time, she has been living on her own in a small studio apartment. Looking after herself took a little getting used to. “I had to get used to doing my own laundry, driving a car, buying my own groceries, cooking and all those things that I hadn’t done before.
“It took me two and a half years to start cooking. I will cook the traditional kapsa: rice and chicken with raisins and caramelised onions. Sometimes I cook for friends, but I have noticed that American people are less open-minded towards food. They like traditional eggs and bacon, bagels and cheese. I tried to convince them to eat a few Saudi dishes but I wasn’t successful, so I ended up eating everything that I cooked and I gained 15kg since I went to the USA.”
Alsanea has a wide circle of friends, she says, dissolving into a fit of giggles when asked if she had ever been in love. She’s clearly not unlike her fictional characters in some respects. Although she insists that she will marry for love, she is adamant that she will only marry a Muslim and it will be somebody of whom her family approves.
“I don’t have a boyfriend. I do have friends but I haven’t had someone who I would consider closer than a friend. But my family would support me if I ever fall in love.
“A non-Muslim would not be an option because I would not be allowed religiously to marry him. We don’t have civil marriage and I’m not the kind of person that would want to live totally away from my culture and religion. There are plenty of nice Muslim men, although you can’t control your heart. I would like to be married and have children but I don’t stress about it. I want to fall in love and I want things to happen naturally. I totally want to take this decision for myself and I want to blame myself if it goes bad.”
She sees her future back in Riyadh, still writing novels but working as an orthodontist and staying close to her family.
“I am very attached to my culture and my language; even though I sometimes write in English I think in Arabic. I know for a fact that I am not going to live outside Saudi unless something changes in the future. I love my country and being around my family. That’s the most important thing for me.”
Surely the author of the 2005 publishing sensation Girls of Riyadh would be some sort of rebel cocking a snook at Saudi Arabia for forcing its women into living a submissive and repressed lifestyle in a male-dominated society.
It is quite the reverse, actually. In a quiet corner of a Dubai hotel, the 27-year-old explained that she loves her country and intends to settle down and live there after she completes her specialist studies in endodontics in America. Another shock. How could the author of a bestseller that is now likely to be made into a movie, not want to be a writer? Why would she want to fix people’s teeth for a living?
“I may be a good writer, but I’m also a very good dentist and that’s what I am going to be. It’s a part of my life that the public don’t know about,” she says, laughing. “I’m getting the highest results in my specialisation, root canals. Dentistry balances my life. Going to work knowing that you’re not famous puts your feet on the ground. Dentistry is my job and writing will always be my passion,” she says firmly, insisting that in her world it is perfectly possible to do both.
Alsanea, whose three older brothers are doctors and whose sister and another brother are orthodontists, studied for her Bachelor of Dentistry at King Saud University in Riyadh before moving to Chicago to do her masters at the University of Illinois. She gained her MSc last year and is now studying for her specialist American Boards degree in endodontics.
“It’s a big thing to get onto the course. I went to Chicago because it’s an excellent dental school and one of my brothers and my sister studied there,” she says with some pride.
She is also working on her second novel and starting to think about a screenplay which she intends to write herself. She is currently considering offers from several film companies and is reluctant simply to turn the project over to somebody else. The prospect of a fat cheque from a big Hollywood studio doesn’t appear to be a factor in her decision-making process. “If I do the movie, I will be writing the screenplay. I am in love with that work. It’s my baby and I don’t want it to be misinterpreted. I haven’t signed anything but it will probably be an American film. It’s a very difficult thing because we don’t have a movie industry in Saudi.”
Writing the screenplay will postpone publication of her second novel, as yet untitled. She says it is a more mature work than her first, which she started writing at the age of 18. “People will definitely have the feeling that I have grown up and matured. I have lived outside my country and experienced a different culture and all of this reflects on the person that I am today. Hopefully, it will be published next year or maybe in two years. Over there [in Chicago], my book has a ‘local author’ sticker on it. People are very proud of me there. They even asked me to do Girls of Chicago,” she says.
As the author of a controversial bestselling first novel, she is much in demand as a speaker at international literary festivals and book fairs all over the world and will speak at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, which starts on Saturday. She also spoke at the Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature in Dubai last month. Girls of Riyadh tells the stories of four young Saudi women from wealthy families growing up in a closed society.
The book chronicles the love lives of the girls, Gamrah, Lamees, Michelle – who is half Saudi and half American – and Sadeem. It is told in the form of a series of e-mails from an unnamed narrator and describes relationships between young men and women in the conservative Saudi Arabian Islamic culture in a way that had never been dealt with before, touching on tricky subjects such as infidelity, homosexuality and domestic violence.
When it was first published in Beirut in Arabic four years ago, it was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia because of what was seen as inflammatory content. Black-market copies were smuggled into the country and soon the internet was abuzz with excited chatter about the new literary sensation. Alsanea was eventually given permission to publish it in Saudi Arabia and it became a bestseller there. It was translated into English in January 2008.
Safely ensconced in the classrooms of her Chicago dental college, Alsanea was largely but not altogether cushioned from the storm her novel caused back home. “I lost friends over the book. It was sad. The book was banned for six months. My scholarship was threatened. I was mentioned in Friday prayers and you can guess what they were saying. It was not pleasant. I received life-threatening e-mails and letters and it affected my life,” she says.
At the height of the controversy she was receiving more than 1,000 emails a day, which she attempted to answer personally, many supportive but many angry and threatening. A group of furious citizens filed a lawsuit with the Court of Grievances in Riyadh against the Ministry of Information for giving the author permission to distribute the novel and demanding that Alsanea be punished for tarnishing the image of Saudi girls. The court rejected their claims.
Alsanea’s close-knit family backed her fully and she says she would never have dared publish without their support. “You can’t publish in a very conservative country without a circle of protection. One of my brothers suggested that I published under an assumed name but I refused. The good thing was that after the book was published in Lebanon, it was allowed to be sold in my country. With the internet you can’t control censorship. The internet has challenged the myth of censorship,” she says.
She grew up as the youngest of six children in considerable comfort in an upper-middle-class Riyadh family. Her father, a journalist and editor, died when she was eight and her mother encouraged all her children to gain a university education and broaden their horizons. “Ours was a very liberal family and I have always known that I would become a writer. I won my first writing competition in a children’s magazine when I was seven. I don’t remember the subject but I remember the Mickey Mouse watch that I won. At school I was always writing and performing plays, so it wasn’t a huge shock for people when I released the book because they have always known that I had this passion and talent for writing.”
Growing up in a family of doctors and dentists, however, she developed a keen interest in medicine and dentistry. “I grew up thinking that I don’t want to make a living in writing. I thought it would kill it for me and make me less creative. This will put pressure on me when I’m writing and I’m happy with this decision. It’s not the same in the Arab world as it is in the West. In the Arab world writers don’t make a lot of money out of their books.”
An avid reader, Alsanea was always aware that in Saudi Arabia there was very little in the way of novels for young women of her generation.
“There was always a gap between intellectuals and readers, whether it was due to the very sophisticated language used in the books or the fact that young people in Saudi preferred to read blogs. The more sophisticated you sound, the more intellectual you were. That was the attitude. Also novels written in Saudi were mostly written by older male authors.
“I was criticised for using Saudi dialect in the novel but I did that on purpose as I didn’t have that urge to be distant from my readers. I wanted to write a novel that I saw myself in as a young girl in Saudi Arabia. I was also criticised for the title that was very general, but I wanted something that describes many of the different types of women I see on a daily basis in my country.”
People often ask her which one of the four girls, five if you count the narrator, represents herself. They also want to know if she is still friends with the others.
“Actually, there were no girlfriends in real life. It’s all fiction. The stories do happen. These were more than four characters. The stories were gathered from 50 or 100 girls in Saudi. I did put parts of my personality in each one of them and I do relate with the stories that I wrote about. Most girls in Saudi relate to one or other of them. The book is not about a personal experience – it’s about a generation’s experiences.”
Before she was published, Alsanea sent her manuscript to Dr Ghazi al Gosaibi, a prominent liberal author and politician, whose writing she admires. It reached him via a chain of about seven people and one day Alsanea received a phone call from him. “I nearly had a heart attack. He was a very humble and funny kind of a guy. He said he usually has a 40-page test for a book. He called me in 30 minutes saying that I passed the test and he was on page 100. That phone call changed my life for ever. It was a magical moment, a dream come true that your mentor and the writer that you grew up reading read something that you wrote. He got the book exactly the way I wanted people to get it.”
Knowing that she was unlikely to receive permission if she were to submit her manuscript to the Ministry of Information, she contacted a publisher in Beirut. The novel came out in September 2005, three months after Alsanea graduated from dental college. “The day after it was published in Lebanon, I did my first Saudi newspaper interview which tells you how quickly the book reached Saudi. Many others followed and there were days when you could read 10 articles in one newspaper because there was such a debate.”
Despite the controversy her book caused for shining a light on the seamier side of the lives of young Saudis, Alsanea is passionately attached to her culture. She always wears a hijab in public even at university in Chicago, although she doesn’t wear an abaya in the States. In the clinic, she will wear a long-sleeved shirt under her medical scrubs.
“It was an entirely personal decision. It reflects a generation or part of a generation of Muslim girls who are religious but at the same time open-minded and open to other cultures and experiences without losing their religious and Islamic identity.”
When she first went to Chicago, she lived with her brother and sister. This year, for the first time, she has been living on her own in a small studio apartment. Looking after herself took a little getting used to. “I had to get used to doing my own laundry, driving a car, buying my own groceries, cooking and all those things that I hadn’t done before.
“It took me two and a half years to start cooking. I will cook the traditional kapsa: rice and chicken with raisins and caramelised onions. Sometimes I cook for friends, but I have noticed that American people are less open-minded towards food. They like traditional eggs and bacon, bagels and cheese. I tried to convince them to eat a few Saudi dishes but I wasn’t successful, so I ended up eating everything that I cooked and I gained 15kg since I went to the USA.”
Alsanea has a wide circle of friends, she says, dissolving into a fit of giggles when asked if she had ever been in love. She’s clearly not unlike her fictional characters in some respects. Although she insists that she will marry for love, she is adamant that she will only marry a Muslim and it will be somebody of whom her family approves.
“I don’t have a boyfriend. I do have friends but I haven’t had someone who I would consider closer than a friend. But my family would support me if I ever fall in love.
“A non-Muslim would not be an option because I would not be allowed religiously to marry him. We don’t have civil marriage and I’m not the kind of person that would want to live totally away from my culture and religion. There are plenty of nice Muslim men, although you can’t control your heart. I would like to be married and have children but I don’t stress about it. I want to fall in love and I want things to happen naturally. I totally want to take this decision for myself and I want to blame myself if it goes bad.”
She sees her future back in Riyadh, still writing novels but working as an orthodontist and staying close to her family.
“I am very attached to my culture and my language; even though I sometimes write in English I think in Arabic. I know for a fact that I am not going to live outside Saudi unless something changes in the future. I love my country and being around my family. That’s the most important thing for me.”
Saturday, 14 March 2009
Reading Lohaidan in Riyadh: Media and the struggle for judicial power in Saudi Arabia
Along with a reported one in seven viewers across the Arab World, Saudis were glued to their television sets during 2008 watching a Turkish soap opera called Noor.[1] The show was dubbed into Levantine Arabic and broadcast three times daily during Ramadan by MBC, a pan-Arab satellite network owned by Walid al-Ibrahim, a brother-in-law of the late Saudi king Fahd bin Abdelaziz Al Saud. Starring an economically independent, unveiled female lead and her tender Casanova of a husband, Noor was so popular that it spurred a large number of Gulf Arab tourists to visit Turkey, including the Saudi first lady Princess Hissa Al-Shaalan, and its blonde and blue-eyed star Kivanc Tatlitu became a heart-throb for Saudi and other women. The drama had a particular grip on the public because, unusually, it was dubbed into colloquial rather than classical Arabic, and its Turkish milieu had a familiarity for Arab audiences that other foreign soaps lack.
The popularity of Noor prompted some Saudi ulama to warn that “secularism” was making its subversive way into Saudi society through the cathode ray. “It is not permitted to watch the Turkish series...They are replete with wickedness, evil, moral collapse and a war on virtues that only God knows the truth of,” Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, the official voice of the government on religious affairs, said in July.[2] In this context, public comments made last Ramadan by one of the most powerful Wahhabi clerics of all, Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan, head of Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Sharia courts, seemed calculated to create the perfect storm of media controversy. Speaking on a religious radio show, Lohaidan claimed that owners of television networks who broadcast “indecent programming” could be executed if tried for their celluloid crimes.[3] Pan-Arab, self-styled liberal outlets such as MBC’s al-Arabiya and Elaph, whose owners have strong connections to the royal family, breathlessly relayed the story with the implication that Lohaidan was inciting vigilante violence against media moguls. Western media, in turn, quickly picked up the story, eager to trumpet what they framed as simply yet another case of the whacky excesses of Saudi Arabia’s puritanical Wahhabi doctrine.
By one reading, the incident marks another episode in the debate over decency in the Islamic state and the limits of expression being conducted by Saudi Arabia’s conservative clerical establishment and the secular, modernist programming broadcast throughout the Middle East by “liberal” satellite channels and their well-connected owners. It is hardly the first time the liberals and the religious conservatives have locked horns. The ma‘rakat al-hadatha, or the “battle for modernity,” as it is often referred to, dates back to the 1980s, when literary critic Abdullah al-Ghaddami, Saudi Arabia’s leading intellectual, introduced the ideas of deconstructionism that had become de mode on Western university campuses to the ultra-conservative Saudi-Wahhabi state. In 2006, al-Qa‘ida leader Osama bin Laden singled out Saudi Labor Minister Ghazi al-Gosaibi, a poet and novelist, as representing a liberal “fifth column” corrupting Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Beyond that Wahhabism has been struggling with elements of modernity for decades, objecting, for example, to the introduction of television and radio in the 1960s and telegraph in the 1920s.
Indeed, Lohaidan’s intervention is part of this wider historical tussle between the two institutions, the Wahhabi clerics and the Al Saud royal family, that give Saudi Arabia its form and substance – a struggle over their respective spheres of influence within the state structure. His controversial comments sprung from a dispute over the future of the judiciary as the traditional preserve of the clerics and the ability of the Wahhabi religious establishment to hold on to the extensive powers it has amassed, not least since the late 1970s.
A shock to the system
The September 11 attacks were the biggest international crisis the Saudi state had faced since the oil embargo of 1973, if not since the kingdom’s foundation. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. They acted in the name of a group headed by a Saudi dissident, and they were all a product of the puritanical and xenophobic religious milieu of Saudi Arabia – though one could argue that the pro-Western policies of Saudi leaders was an equal if not greater factor in producing the mindset that led to the attacks. Revelations emerged in the weeks following 9/11 of Saudi Arabia’s state-backed system of funding of Islamic causes, charity and proselytism around the world being exploited to funnel money to al-Qa‘ida.
When George W. Bush declared his “axis of evil” in early 2002, many Saudis were relieved they had not been included. In an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Crown Prince Abdullah faced the question in February 2002 of why Saudi Arabia had not offered a clear apology to America for the atrocity.[4] As it became increasingly clear during 2002 that the Bush administration was set on invading Iraq, the Saudi regime and the business, tribal and religious elites huddled around it worried again that the real target in one way or another was Saudi Arabia. Would the invasion end at Iraq? And if it did in a military sense, the democratic experiment there could expand and create unwelcome pressures on the royal family. Further, word leaked from Washington that Pentagon analysts were bandying around ideas of decapitating Al Saud and chopping their ever-controversial state into pieces.
The Saudi response, masterminded by Crown Prince Abdullah despite resistance from his half-brothers Prince Nayef and Prince Sultan, according to diplomats in Riyadh, was to push forward with some modernizations that would gradually roll back the influence of the clerical establishment while not tampering with the fundamentals of the relationship between Al Saud and al-Wahhabiyyah, where the royal family controls state policy while Wahhabi clerics take charge of society – the duality at the heart of the Saudi-Wahhabi polity.
Saudi media have played a central role in this ongoing strategy. The Saudi press was given a green light to engage the liberal-conservative debate more forcefully and risk attacks on the religious police, the “committee for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice,” one of the citadels of clerical power which retained the support of Nayef and other powerful princes. Changes were also enacted in the education curriculum to water down the focus on religion and introduce compulsory English lessons at the primary school level. But the Interior Ministry was supportive of more state monitoring of clerics at Friday prayers once Saudis who had fought in Afghanistan opened a front inside Saudi Arabia itself in 2003. These changes reflected the fact that the now-dominant Saudi crown prince and his allies agreed with the Western analysis that the discourse of Wahhabi clerics needed disciplining and that smoothing the rougher edges of al-Wahhabiyyah was key to ensuring the family and their state’s survival.
Saudi Arabia’s project to recover its international standing after the debacle of September 11 also included opening its doors to the foreign press. The word went out that major news outlets were welcome in the kingdom, not just to send correspondents in for reporting stints, but to open offices. The foreigners may not like what they see, but the more familiar they make the West with Saudi society, the less likely that Western decision-makers would entertain ideas of changing the regime. It was a reaffirmation of the theory “better the devil you know,” and mirrored the policy which Washington and its allies have followed with Saudi Arabia for decades, rejecting the dissidents who emerged in London in the 1990s and fearing the Islamist base that produced the likes of bin Laden and his famed fifteen followers.[5]
But the opening to foreign media has moved at a snail’s pace. Though Reuters established an editorial operation in 2003, the death of a BBC cameraman and injury of a BBC reporter in a shooting incident during the mini-insurgency launched by al-Qa‘ida operatives in 2004 caused many media organizations to think twice. It was difficult to find journalists prepared to work in the kingdom and the costs were prohibitive in themselves. When CNN identified an able Saudi in 2006 to establish as their correspondent in the kingdom, they preferred to send him to Atlanta to train and make use of him abroad rather than have him set up an operation inside a country where red tape, invisible red lines and a suspicious mentality make the journalist’s work extremely difficult. To date there is no BBC or CNN office in Saudi Arabia, and the number one Arabic news outlet, al-Jazeera, spent years shut out of the country because its open editorial line gave no special consideration for Saudi Arabia and its self-described khususiyya (special characteristics). Al-Jazeera stopped reporting sensitive news about Saudi Arabia in 2007 following a rapprochement between its Qatari royal owners and Al Saud, and as a result the channel hopes to open an office in Riyadh soon.
Reading Lohaidan
With domestic media outlets polarized along the conservative-liberal divide, and foreign media still lacking a firm foothold in the country, Saudi Arabia remains far from being an open book. Perhaps no incident better illustrates this than the recent controversy over Sheikh Lohaidan’s statement on the owners of satellite networks. The sheikh often speaks on a radio show Noor ‘ala al-Darb (Light on the Path) on the state-run Qur’an Station, a weekly program where senior clerics offer fatwas, or religious opinions from a specialist in Islamic law, in response to questions from listeners or the presenter directly. In an edition that aired during Ramadan of 2008, the presenter asked Lohaidan what his advice was to the owners of Arab satellite channels that air “bad” programs generally, and even in the month of Ramadan (when comedy shows air after the sunset prayer as a captive audience settles down in front of the television after breaking the daylong fast). “I want to advise the owners of these channels that broadcast programs containing indecency and vulgarity and warn them of the consequences … They can be put to death through the judicial process (qada’an),” he said. “If the evil of those who promote corruption in belief and actions cannot be held back through lesser punishments, then they can be put to death through the judicial process.”[6]
The key phrase here was qada’an, through the judicial process. For Lohaidan there was no need for him to clarify this point further in his initial comments, since for the Saudi clerics the process is all there is; they could not conceive of a moral-criminal issue in any other fashion. In classic Sunni legal thinking, followed to the letter in Saudi Arabia, God’s justice is dispensed by His cleric-lieutenants on Earth who are to be found in Sharia courts ready to pass judgment based on the divine law. The Saudi ulama have the unique privilege in the Islamic world of presiding as judges in a Sharia court system – this is the very definition of the Islamic state in their eyes. But this did not prevent Saudi-owned “liberal” media from playing-up Lohaidan’s remarks because they fit their agenda of watering down the power of the Wahhabi ulama. Before long, the story was all over pan-Arab television networks such as MBC and its al-Arabiya news channel, owned by the brother-in-law of former King Fahd, and newspapers such as al-Watan, owned by Khaled al-Faisal, son of former King Faisal and nephew of King Abdullah.
Indeed, it was the Saudi-owned television channels that were directly under attack. The main entertainment channels on pan-Arab satellite TV showing the offending material are all Saudi-owned. The MBC network, which includes al-Arabiya news channel, is owned by a brother-in-law of the late King Fahd; Lebanon’s LBC and the music channel Rotana are owned by the entrepreneurial Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the Orbit and ART networks are also owned by Saudi citizens. Their popularity far surpasses that of the staid state television channels that fit the orthodoxy of a religiously conservative society under the eyes of Sharia court judges. They also outdo in popularity the plethora of religious channels ranged against them, many of which were set up by the same royals or royal hangers-on (viz. Alwaleed’s al-Resala) or were themselves post-9/11 efforts to tame, redirect and channel Saudi religious zealotry (such as al-Majd).
Channels and websites such as al-Arabiya and Elaph ran headlines saying the fatwa “approved killing” satellite channel owners and gave the impression that Lohaidan was encouraging vigilantes to assassinate television chiefs. Western and other Arab outlets tended to take their cue from those reports.[7] Yet the implication was ridiculous; it was hardly as if Alwaleed, King Fahd’s sister, or her family, or the manager of al-Arabiya in Dubai were seriously worried about attacks to their person. The royals live in a world apart of palaces, servants, private planes and cruise ships on the French Riviera. No one could get near them if they tried.
The popularity of Noor prompted some Saudi ulama to warn that “secularism” was making its subversive way into Saudi society through the cathode ray. “It is not permitted to watch the Turkish series...They are replete with wickedness, evil, moral collapse and a war on virtues that only God knows the truth of,” Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, the official voice of the government on religious affairs, said in July.[2] In this context, public comments made last Ramadan by one of the most powerful Wahhabi clerics of all, Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan, head of Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Sharia courts, seemed calculated to create the perfect storm of media controversy. Speaking on a religious radio show, Lohaidan claimed that owners of television networks who broadcast “indecent programming” could be executed if tried for their celluloid crimes.[3] Pan-Arab, self-styled liberal outlets such as MBC’s al-Arabiya and Elaph, whose owners have strong connections to the royal family, breathlessly relayed the story with the implication that Lohaidan was inciting vigilante violence against media moguls. Western media, in turn, quickly picked up the story, eager to trumpet what they framed as simply yet another case of the whacky excesses of Saudi Arabia’s puritanical Wahhabi doctrine.
By one reading, the incident marks another episode in the debate over decency in the Islamic state and the limits of expression being conducted by Saudi Arabia’s conservative clerical establishment and the secular, modernist programming broadcast throughout the Middle East by “liberal” satellite channels and their well-connected owners. It is hardly the first time the liberals and the religious conservatives have locked horns. The ma‘rakat al-hadatha, or the “battle for modernity,” as it is often referred to, dates back to the 1980s, when literary critic Abdullah al-Ghaddami, Saudi Arabia’s leading intellectual, introduced the ideas of deconstructionism that had become de mode on Western university campuses to the ultra-conservative Saudi-Wahhabi state. In 2006, al-Qa‘ida leader Osama bin Laden singled out Saudi Labor Minister Ghazi al-Gosaibi, a poet and novelist, as representing a liberal “fifth column” corrupting Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Beyond that Wahhabism has been struggling with elements of modernity for decades, objecting, for example, to the introduction of television and radio in the 1960s and telegraph in the 1920s.
Indeed, Lohaidan’s intervention is part of this wider historical tussle between the two institutions, the Wahhabi clerics and the Al Saud royal family, that give Saudi Arabia its form and substance – a struggle over their respective spheres of influence within the state structure. His controversial comments sprung from a dispute over the future of the judiciary as the traditional preserve of the clerics and the ability of the Wahhabi religious establishment to hold on to the extensive powers it has amassed, not least since the late 1970s.
A shock to the system
The September 11 attacks were the biggest international crisis the Saudi state had faced since the oil embargo of 1973, if not since the kingdom’s foundation. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. They acted in the name of a group headed by a Saudi dissident, and they were all a product of the puritanical and xenophobic religious milieu of Saudi Arabia – though one could argue that the pro-Western policies of Saudi leaders was an equal if not greater factor in producing the mindset that led to the attacks. Revelations emerged in the weeks following 9/11 of Saudi Arabia’s state-backed system of funding of Islamic causes, charity and proselytism around the world being exploited to funnel money to al-Qa‘ida.
When George W. Bush declared his “axis of evil” in early 2002, many Saudis were relieved they had not been included. In an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Crown Prince Abdullah faced the question in February 2002 of why Saudi Arabia had not offered a clear apology to America for the atrocity.[4] As it became increasingly clear during 2002 that the Bush administration was set on invading Iraq, the Saudi regime and the business, tribal and religious elites huddled around it worried again that the real target in one way or another was Saudi Arabia. Would the invasion end at Iraq? And if it did in a military sense, the democratic experiment there could expand and create unwelcome pressures on the royal family. Further, word leaked from Washington that Pentagon analysts were bandying around ideas of decapitating Al Saud and chopping their ever-controversial state into pieces.
The Saudi response, masterminded by Crown Prince Abdullah despite resistance from his half-brothers Prince Nayef and Prince Sultan, according to diplomats in Riyadh, was to push forward with some modernizations that would gradually roll back the influence of the clerical establishment while not tampering with the fundamentals of the relationship between Al Saud and al-Wahhabiyyah, where the royal family controls state policy while Wahhabi clerics take charge of society – the duality at the heart of the Saudi-Wahhabi polity.
Saudi media have played a central role in this ongoing strategy. The Saudi press was given a green light to engage the liberal-conservative debate more forcefully and risk attacks on the religious police, the “committee for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice,” one of the citadels of clerical power which retained the support of Nayef and other powerful princes. Changes were also enacted in the education curriculum to water down the focus on religion and introduce compulsory English lessons at the primary school level. But the Interior Ministry was supportive of more state monitoring of clerics at Friday prayers once Saudis who had fought in Afghanistan opened a front inside Saudi Arabia itself in 2003. These changes reflected the fact that the now-dominant Saudi crown prince and his allies agreed with the Western analysis that the discourse of Wahhabi clerics needed disciplining and that smoothing the rougher edges of al-Wahhabiyyah was key to ensuring the family and their state’s survival.
Saudi Arabia’s project to recover its international standing after the debacle of September 11 also included opening its doors to the foreign press. The word went out that major news outlets were welcome in the kingdom, not just to send correspondents in for reporting stints, but to open offices. The foreigners may not like what they see, but the more familiar they make the West with Saudi society, the less likely that Western decision-makers would entertain ideas of changing the regime. It was a reaffirmation of the theory “better the devil you know,” and mirrored the policy which Washington and its allies have followed with Saudi Arabia for decades, rejecting the dissidents who emerged in London in the 1990s and fearing the Islamist base that produced the likes of bin Laden and his famed fifteen followers.[5]
But the opening to foreign media has moved at a snail’s pace. Though Reuters established an editorial operation in 2003, the death of a BBC cameraman and injury of a BBC reporter in a shooting incident during the mini-insurgency launched by al-Qa‘ida operatives in 2004 caused many media organizations to think twice. It was difficult to find journalists prepared to work in the kingdom and the costs were prohibitive in themselves. When CNN identified an able Saudi in 2006 to establish as their correspondent in the kingdom, they preferred to send him to Atlanta to train and make use of him abroad rather than have him set up an operation inside a country where red tape, invisible red lines and a suspicious mentality make the journalist’s work extremely difficult. To date there is no BBC or CNN office in Saudi Arabia, and the number one Arabic news outlet, al-Jazeera, spent years shut out of the country because its open editorial line gave no special consideration for Saudi Arabia and its self-described khususiyya (special characteristics). Al-Jazeera stopped reporting sensitive news about Saudi Arabia in 2007 following a rapprochement between its Qatari royal owners and Al Saud, and as a result the channel hopes to open an office in Riyadh soon.
Reading Lohaidan
With domestic media outlets polarized along the conservative-liberal divide, and foreign media still lacking a firm foothold in the country, Saudi Arabia remains far from being an open book. Perhaps no incident better illustrates this than the recent controversy over Sheikh Lohaidan’s statement on the owners of satellite networks. The sheikh often speaks on a radio show Noor ‘ala al-Darb (Light on the Path) on the state-run Qur’an Station, a weekly program where senior clerics offer fatwas, or religious opinions from a specialist in Islamic law, in response to questions from listeners or the presenter directly. In an edition that aired during Ramadan of 2008, the presenter asked Lohaidan what his advice was to the owners of Arab satellite channels that air “bad” programs generally, and even in the month of Ramadan (when comedy shows air after the sunset prayer as a captive audience settles down in front of the television after breaking the daylong fast). “I want to advise the owners of these channels that broadcast programs containing indecency and vulgarity and warn them of the consequences … They can be put to death through the judicial process (qada’an),” he said. “If the evil of those who promote corruption in belief and actions cannot be held back through lesser punishments, then they can be put to death through the judicial process.”[6]
The key phrase here was qada’an, through the judicial process. For Lohaidan there was no need for him to clarify this point further in his initial comments, since for the Saudi clerics the process is all there is; they could not conceive of a moral-criminal issue in any other fashion. In classic Sunni legal thinking, followed to the letter in Saudi Arabia, God’s justice is dispensed by His cleric-lieutenants on Earth who are to be found in Sharia courts ready to pass judgment based on the divine law. The Saudi ulama have the unique privilege in the Islamic world of presiding as judges in a Sharia court system – this is the very definition of the Islamic state in their eyes. But this did not prevent Saudi-owned “liberal” media from playing-up Lohaidan’s remarks because they fit their agenda of watering down the power of the Wahhabi ulama. Before long, the story was all over pan-Arab television networks such as MBC and its al-Arabiya news channel, owned by the brother-in-law of former King Fahd, and newspapers such as al-Watan, owned by Khaled al-Faisal, son of former King Faisal and nephew of King Abdullah.
Indeed, it was the Saudi-owned television channels that were directly under attack. The main entertainment channels on pan-Arab satellite TV showing the offending material are all Saudi-owned. The MBC network, which includes al-Arabiya news channel, is owned by a brother-in-law of the late King Fahd; Lebanon’s LBC and the music channel Rotana are owned by the entrepreneurial Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the Orbit and ART networks are also owned by Saudi citizens. Their popularity far surpasses that of the staid state television channels that fit the orthodoxy of a religiously conservative society under the eyes of Sharia court judges. They also outdo in popularity the plethora of religious channels ranged against them, many of which were set up by the same royals or royal hangers-on (viz. Alwaleed’s al-Resala) or were themselves post-9/11 efforts to tame, redirect and channel Saudi religious zealotry (such as al-Majd).
Channels and websites such as al-Arabiya and Elaph ran headlines saying the fatwa “approved killing” satellite channel owners and gave the impression that Lohaidan was encouraging vigilantes to assassinate television chiefs. Western and other Arab outlets tended to take their cue from those reports.[7] Yet the implication was ridiculous; it was hardly as if Alwaleed, King Fahd’s sister, or her family, or the manager of al-Arabiya in Dubai were seriously worried about attacks to their person. The royals live in a world apart of palaces, servants, private planes and cruise ships on the French Riviera. No one could get near them if they tried.
Saturday, 31 January 2009
Saudi Arabia opens its doors to tourists... just a little
From the top of the huge sand dune the “Dancing Ladies” didn't look that big. The two sandstone towers, whipped and striated by the wind over centuries into fantastical shapes, rose from the valley floor in front of us, but our lofty perch made them look modest. As our guides drove the Toyota Land Cruisers carefully down the dune, we waded after them, descending into a forest of sandstone.
Ten minutes later, sheltering from the sun at the base of the Dancing Ladies, we changed our minds. As our guides served us cardamom-flavoured coffee, we peered up at the giant towers and the cliffs surrounding us, dwarfed by their dizzying height of more than 100m.
Yet our off-road driving tour through the extraordinary landscape of northern Saudi Arabia wasn't even the highlight of our week's visit to this secretive, semi-closed country.
We had started our trip in the modern capital, Riyadh, with a small group of journalists and academics. Most visitors to Saudi Arabia are the five million Muslims who make the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca. But the Saudi Government, keen to create jobs in tourism, is now tentatively opening up the country to others, and British travel companies are responding.
Can I holiday in Saudi Arabia?
In November a British tour operator, The Traveller, offered the first group cultural tour to the country for seven years. British Airways, which stopped flying there in 2005, will resume flights to Riyadh and Jeddah in March, and bmi has doubled the frequency on its long-established route to Riyadh.
At the offices of the Supreme Commission for Tourism in Riyadh, Abdullah al-Jehani, a senior marketing official, admitted: “Saudi Arabia has been a closed country to the outside world. People know about Saudi Arabia what they see on TV - violence and problems with the regime. But we now have a 20-year tourism programme and soon we should be issuing tourist visas.”
It's true that the news from Saudi is often unpalatable. In February 2007 four French tourists were killed near Madain Saleh, the ancient site of stone-carved tombs in northern Saudi Arabia that was to be the key stop on our itinerary. And the BBC's Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner, was shot and seriously injured, and Simon Cumbers, his cameraman colleague, killed in Riyadh in 2004.
Before my trip, I had asked Gardner if he thought Saudi Arabia to be ready for tourism. “It's a really interesting country,” he said, sounding remarkably free of bitterness. “It's surprisingly diverse, and Saudis, once they meet you, are very hospitable.
The flip side is that there is an ongoing terrorist threat. But the threat is nothing like it was in 2003-04.”
Back in Riyadh, we were keen to start exploring. First stop was Dir'aiyah, the 18th-century capital of the Saud family (the rulers who give the country its name). The old mud and straw walls of this crumbling oasis town form a stark contrast to Riyadh's landmark skyscrapers, only half-an-hour's drive away, and it was a reminder that, for all the steel and smoked glass down the road, Saudi Arabians still see themselves as a desert people at heart.
The next day we flew south to Abha, centre of the mountainous Asir district bordering Yemen, where Saudis go in summer to escape the desert heat. The highlights here were a vertigo-inducing cable-car ride down a mountain, and an afternoon at Rijal Alma'a, a restored 300-year-old village of tall, narrow houses built into the mountainside for maximum protection in this warlike area.
In this cool region I was for once glad of my abaya - the long, black gown that all women must wear in public, along with a hijab (headscarf). In Riyadh's 35C heat this was akin to walking around in your own personal sauna. Local men usually wear cool, white robes known as thobes; it seems that the abaya's stifling black is intended to discourage women from leaving home. Women visitors must accept that wearing an abaya is an important part of showing respect in Saudi culture. More practically, not to wear one will open you to abuse on the streets. I certainly felt more at ease when covered up, though I was frustrated by the many restrictions: women are not allowed to drive, use internet cafés or go into many restaurants.
It was frustrating not being able to head off and explore on my own. But I felt able to throw off my abaya when we finally reached Madain Saleh because there were no other visitors to see us. And what a place it is! It's extraordinary to think that within six hours' flight of the UK is a site as awe-inspiring as Petra, Leptis Magna or Ephesus, yet it is barely visited, even by Saudis.
Madain Saleh was built between 100BC and AD100 by the Nabataeans, soon after they built Petra, in Jordan, and it formed a key stop on the trade route between Petra and Mecca. Nothing is left of the city itself, but more than 130 tombs remain.
We started exploring in the Khuraymat area, where dozens of tombs are cut into the sandstone rockface, their exteriors borrowing architectural elements from the Assyrians, Egyptians and Romans. Inside each is a chamber with carved niches in which to bury the bodies of the family that owned the tomb.
Can I holiday in Saudi Arabia?
After a snatched lunch back at our hotel, the Arac, in nearby al-Ula, we returned to explore the Qasr al-Bint tombs, climbing metal ladders to those cut high into the rock. Finally, as the sun disappeared, we visited the enormous, free-standing tomb of Qasr al-Farid. It glowed pinkly as we made our white-robed guide, Mazin al-Juwaid, pose for pictures in front of it.
At the end of our week I asked my fellow party member Sir Alan Munro what he made of it. Sir Alan was British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1993 and has visited regularly since. “I have come away very encouraged at the new openness and confidence there is here,” he said. “For tourists there are still niggling issues such as the attitude to women, but the sort of people likely to come here, for cultural trips, are probably not going to mind that.”
Our group - and the two other tour groups we met, from Japan and Australia - had a permanent police escort. Al-Juwaid joked that the crime rate was so low that the police had time on their hands but, given the shooting of the French tourists, it certainly made us feel secure.
On our final night, in the port city of Jeddah, we sat around smoking fragrant, apple-tobacco sheesha pipes after supper at the popular al-Nakhil restaurant on the Corniche. A cool breeze blew in off the Red Sea and we reflected that our seafood spread had been so delicious that we had forgotten about the alcohol ban. Saudi Arabia is a fascinating destination, hugely worth visiting, but as I looked around at my fellow abaya-clad diners I realised that it's a country you must visit very much on its own terms.
Monday, 22 December 2008
Women push for reform of divorce rules
DAMMAM, SAUDI ARABIA // When her husband refused her request to divorce, a Saudi woman decided to ask for one herself. Two years later, she is still waiting for the official divorce decree.
First, her brothers declined to act as her male guardian in court, as required under Saudi law. They relented only after pleadings from her mother. Then her husband would not show up for the hearings. And even though the judge finally agreed that a divorce was warranted, he said the husband could still raise objections.
“I cannot do anything without this divorce paper,” said the 36-year-old education ministry administrator, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma associated with divorce in the conservative kingdom. “The husband plays on the time.”
For many Saudi women, divorce is not a release, but a new kind of restraint. All too often, they get nothing but trouble and scorn from former husbands, courts and even their families.
But a gathering recently in Dammam at the Eastern Province’s Chamber of Commerce indicates that change, perhaps, is coming.
About 150 Saudi women gathered in the chamber’s auditorium for the Saudi Divorce Initiative Forum – the kingdom’s first female-organised public forum on difficulties faced by women during and after divorce.
The aim, organisers said, was to kick-start public debate about how to better enforce already existing – but often ignored – legal protections for women and children.
“We are not here venting, we are not here screaming,” said Thuraya Arrayed, a long-time women’s rights activist based in Al Khobar who spoke at the forum. “What we are here for is to study the problem from all perspectives… and then come up with our recommendations.”
The event was held on Nov 25 to coincide with International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Under the patronage of Princess Jawahir bint Naif, it had impressive backers: Chambers of Commerce in Dammam and Jeddah, Saudi human rights groups, the ministry of social affairs, and the country’s top advisory body, which is the Shura Council.
The women heard more than a dozen female speakers talk about legal, psychological, financial, family and emotional difficulties related to divorce.
According to the ministry of social affairs, the kingdom has a divorce rate of 30 per cent, though other estimates place it at 60 per cent, according to press reports.
“It’s the first one of its kind,” said Luluah al Shammari, a Saudi educator who had set up an information booth on a programme promoting dialogue outside the conference hall. “It’s about time to have it [divorce] come into the open.”
In interviews on the sidelines of the forum, women described typical problems during divorce. Judges can refuse to consider a woman’s divorce pleadings unless she is accompanied by a male relative. Men sometimes obtain divorce decrees without informing their wives. And former husbands often face no legal penalty if they stop child support or snatch children from their mother.
“If you are divorced and want an ID or official court papers, you cannot have them except through your ex-husband. But if he doesn’t want to [get them], nobody can make him,” said Hind K Alzahid, manager of the Business Women Center, an affiliate of the local chamber of commerce. The centre helped organise the forum.
Sometimes, children cannot attend school because their father does not provide his former wife with the necessary official papers, Ms Alzahid said. “It’s a big problem, especially in poor communities.”
Some men verbally divorce their wives, but fail to get final court decrees, leaving the woman in legal limbo, and unable to travel or remarry because she cannot prove she is divorced, the women said.
Worst of all, families usually blame the woman for the failed marriage.
The spark for the meeting came from the Dammam-based journalist Haifa Khalid, who started the kingdom’s first website devoted to divorce (www.saudidivorce.org) last spring.
“Women and their children are the weaker side in any divorce. There still isn’t a system in place that understands their needs,” Ms Khalid told the Arab News, a Saudi daily.
King Abdullah’s picture appeared on the forum’s brochures and posters inside the Chamber of Commerce auditorium. Several women said his encouragement to Saudi women to address problems in their society had inspired them to become active on the divorce issue.
“He’s supporting women,” Ms Alzahid said. “He gives us the right to talk.”
The forum concluded with a formal list of more than 70 recommendations that organisers said they plan to present to official agencies.
Among the suggestions: give both husband and wife an original copy of their marriage contract. Allow women to hire female lawyers to represent them in court. Launch a public awareness campaign “to remove the stigma attached to being a divorced woman”.
For the woman whose husband refused her request to divorce, she has already gained an important side benefit.
“Nobody will force me to do anything now,” she said. “I’ve completely changed because of all of these troubles I passed through.”
First, her brothers declined to act as her male guardian in court, as required under Saudi law. They relented only after pleadings from her mother. Then her husband would not show up for the hearings. And even though the judge finally agreed that a divorce was warranted, he said the husband could still raise objections.
“I cannot do anything without this divorce paper,” said the 36-year-old education ministry administrator, who asked not to be identified because of the stigma associated with divorce in the conservative kingdom. “The husband plays on the time.”
For many Saudi women, divorce is not a release, but a new kind of restraint. All too often, they get nothing but trouble and scorn from former husbands, courts and even their families.
But a gathering recently in Dammam at the Eastern Province’s Chamber of Commerce indicates that change, perhaps, is coming.
About 150 Saudi women gathered in the chamber’s auditorium for the Saudi Divorce Initiative Forum – the kingdom’s first female-organised public forum on difficulties faced by women during and after divorce.
The aim, organisers said, was to kick-start public debate about how to better enforce already existing – but often ignored – legal protections for women and children.
“We are not here venting, we are not here screaming,” said Thuraya Arrayed, a long-time women’s rights activist based in Al Khobar who spoke at the forum. “What we are here for is to study the problem from all perspectives… and then come up with our recommendations.”
The event was held on Nov 25 to coincide with International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Under the patronage of Princess Jawahir bint Naif, it had impressive backers: Chambers of Commerce in Dammam and Jeddah, Saudi human rights groups, the ministry of social affairs, and the country’s top advisory body, which is the Shura Council.
The women heard more than a dozen female speakers talk about legal, psychological, financial, family and emotional difficulties related to divorce.
According to the ministry of social affairs, the kingdom has a divorce rate of 30 per cent, though other estimates place it at 60 per cent, according to press reports.
“It’s the first one of its kind,” said Luluah al Shammari, a Saudi educator who had set up an information booth on a programme promoting dialogue outside the conference hall. “It’s about time to have it [divorce] come into the open.”
In interviews on the sidelines of the forum, women described typical problems during divorce. Judges can refuse to consider a woman’s divorce pleadings unless she is accompanied by a male relative. Men sometimes obtain divorce decrees without informing their wives. And former husbands often face no legal penalty if they stop child support or snatch children from their mother.
“If you are divorced and want an ID or official court papers, you cannot have them except through your ex-husband. But if he doesn’t want to [get them], nobody can make him,” said Hind K Alzahid, manager of the Business Women Center, an affiliate of the local chamber of commerce. The centre helped organise the forum.
Sometimes, children cannot attend school because their father does not provide his former wife with the necessary official papers, Ms Alzahid said. “It’s a big problem, especially in poor communities.”
Some men verbally divorce their wives, but fail to get final court decrees, leaving the woman in legal limbo, and unable to travel or remarry because she cannot prove she is divorced, the women said.
Worst of all, families usually blame the woman for the failed marriage.
The spark for the meeting came from the Dammam-based journalist Haifa Khalid, who started the kingdom’s first website devoted to divorce (www.saudidivorce.org) last spring.
“Women and their children are the weaker side in any divorce. There still isn’t a system in place that understands their needs,” Ms Khalid told the Arab News, a Saudi daily.
King Abdullah’s picture appeared on the forum’s brochures and posters inside the Chamber of Commerce auditorium. Several women said his encouragement to Saudi women to address problems in their society had inspired them to become active on the divorce issue.
“He’s supporting women,” Ms Alzahid said. “He gives us the right to talk.”
The forum concluded with a formal list of more than 70 recommendations that organisers said they plan to present to official agencies.
Among the suggestions: give both husband and wife an original copy of their marriage contract. Allow women to hire female lawyers to represent them in court. Launch a public awareness campaign “to remove the stigma attached to being a divorced woman”.
For the woman whose husband refused her request to divorce, she has already gained an important side benefit.
“Nobody will force me to do anything now,” she said. “I’ve completely changed because of all of these troubles I passed through.”
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
Qutb books banned in school libraries
ABHA: The Ministry of Education recently ordered the removal of two books from school libraries because of the extremist ideas they contained.
“The books, ‘The Lies About Sayyid Qutb’ and ‘The Jihad in the Way of God,’ are banned from school libraries because of their extremist and confusing ideas that may misinform students,” Abdul Rahman Al-Fasil, director general of Boys Education Administration in Asir province, told Arab News yesterday.
Ibrahim Al-Hamdan, director general of the Girls Education Administration in Baha, said the ban on the two books was aimed at protecting the young students from deviant ideology.
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author, was the leading intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s.
“The school libraries have been stocking books for a long time without any scrutiny of their content for their suitability for the students,” he added.
Saudi writer Abdul Wahid Al-Ansari said the ministry did the right thing if the ideas in the two books are harmful to students. Al-Ansari did not rule out the possibility of the presence of several other books in school libraries that might sow seeds of deviant thought in the young minds.
A source at the Ministry of Education said in a statement to Arab News that it is not the first time that the ministry issued orders to withdraw books from school libraries. It has issued several circulars in the past listing the titles that are not allowed at schools.
“The ministry has also issued a list of books that could be included in the school libraries. Their suitability for schools has been ensured,” the source said. He added that the copies of the withdrawn books would be destroyed or kept in a special warehouse.
“The books, ‘The Lies About Sayyid Qutb’ and ‘The Jihad in the Way of God,’ are banned from school libraries because of their extremist and confusing ideas that may misinform students,” Abdul Rahman Al-Fasil, director general of Boys Education Administration in Asir province, told Arab News yesterday.
Ibrahim Al-Hamdan, director general of the Girls Education Administration in Baha, said the ban on the two books was aimed at protecting the young students from deviant ideology.
Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author, was the leading intellectual of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s.
“The school libraries have been stocking books for a long time without any scrutiny of their content for their suitability for the students,” he added.
Saudi writer Abdul Wahid Al-Ansari said the ministry did the right thing if the ideas in the two books are harmful to students. Al-Ansari did not rule out the possibility of the presence of several other books in school libraries that might sow seeds of deviant thought in the young minds.
A source at the Ministry of Education said in a statement to Arab News that it is not the first time that the ministry issued orders to withdraw books from school libraries. It has issued several circulars in the past listing the titles that are not allowed at schools.
“The ministry has also issued a list of books that could be included in the school libraries. Their suitability for schools has been ensured,” the source said. He added that the copies of the withdrawn books would be destroyed or kept in a special warehouse.
Monday, 17 November 2008
Saudi rights activists win honours elsewhere
RIYADH // Two outspoken Saudi activists who face restrictions from their government have recently been honoured with international awards.
Abdul Rahman al Lahim, a lawyer banned from foreign travel, was one of five winners of this year’s Human Rights Defender award given by Human Rights Watch.
Separately, Hatoon Ajwad al Fassi, a professor of history who is barred from teaching, was named by the French government to the Order of Academic Palms, which recognises noteworthy academic achievement.
Mr Lahim is the first Saudi lawyer to mount a court challenge to illegal actions by the religious police, also known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. In one pending case, Mr Lahim represents the family of a man allegedly beaten to death by members of the commission for possessing alcohol.
Unable to attend the ceremony in London last week, Mr Lahim prepared remarks that were read at the event.
“This award is an acknowledgement of the hundreds of human rights activists in Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It is also a recognition of the work of brave writers who have spoken against Islamist extremists and their calls for violence.”
Christoph Wilcke, a senior researcher on Saudi Arabia at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the award recognises that “Lahim fights for the rights of his fellow citizens against arbitrary and unjust rulings.
“He is at the forefront of the struggle to put into effect the kind of judicial reforms that King Abdullah has announced.”
Prior to his law career, Mr Lahim wrote about human rights as a newspaper columnist. He holds a degree in sharia from Imam Muhammad bin Saud University in Riyadh.
In 2004, Mr Lahim was the lead defence lawyer for three political reformists who were put on trial after advocating that Saudi Arabia become a constitutional monarchy.
Jailed in late 2004, he was kept in solitary confinement until he and his clients were pardoned by King Abdullah in 2005.
Mr Lahim, who received another human rights award this year from the American Bar Association, came to international prominence in 2007 when he took up the appeal of a woman from Qatif in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province who had been sentenced by a Saudi court to 90 lashings after being gang-raped.
Her punishment was for an act that preceded the rape: being in a car alone with a man who was not related to her, which is illegal in Saudi Arabia.
An appeals court increased the woman’s sentence to 200 lashings and six months in jail. In Dec 2007, King Abdullah set aside the woman’s sentence after the case drew international criticism.
In a recent interview in his Riyadh office, with walls featuring pictures of famous human right defenders, including Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Mr Lahim said he had sued members of the religious police to establish the principle that no one is above the law.
Most commission members, he said, “still think that they are above the law. But keeping the pressure on them, especially if some of them are punished, will have a very big effect. It will deter them”.
The commission recently announced that it was establishing a department to monitor its members’ actions.
The Saudi press did not take note of Mr Lahim’s award, except for Al Watan columnist Abdullah al Mutairi, who called the lawyer “an important phenomenon in modern Saudi history as he… values human rights awareness”.
Mr Mutairi said it “is wrong to believe that we are perfect and we’ll continue to be perfect, self-praising ourselves and closing off our minds and souls from any criticism that might help us uncover flaws”.
Neither of Saudi Arabia’s two human rights societies publicly welcomed Mr Lahim’s award. “I was expecting the [government-appointed] Human Rights Commission to call and congratulate me at the least, but they didn’t,” he said.
The French honour Ms Fassi received gives her the title of Knight in the Order of Academic Palms.
Raised in Mecca, Ms Fassi said she learnt to speak French as a child while studying in Lebanon.
She has given lectures about Saudi culture to French audiences, including one at the French Embassy in Riyadh, about Maidan Saleh. That is the Saudi site of the pre-Islamic Nabataean culture, which is Ms Fassi’s academic speciality.
Ms Fassi’s doctorate thesis, titled Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Nabataea, found that women in this urbanised society, whose capital was at Petra in South Jordan, had a high degree of independence, conducting legal and business activities on their own.
This status contrasts with current restrictions on Saudi women, who need a male guardian to obtain a business licence, travel abroad and make contracts.
In a recent interview, Ms Fassi, who is an assistant professor at King Saud University, said she had never been told why she had been barred from the classroom since 2000.
Ms Fassi, who writes a regular newspaper column and is active in promoting women’s rights, said she goes to the university every day even though she cannot lecture.
“I’m the only professor in the female section of the department graduated from outside Saudi Arabia,” she said, adding that she hopes the French award will have “a positive effect” on her situation.
“Just a few months ago,” she said, “the king himself initiated bonuses for those who receive international awards.”
cmurphy@thenational.ae
Abdul Rahman al Lahim, a lawyer banned from foreign travel, was one of five winners of this year’s Human Rights Defender award given by Human Rights Watch.
Separately, Hatoon Ajwad al Fassi, a professor of history who is barred from teaching, was named by the French government to the Order of Academic Palms, which recognises noteworthy academic achievement.
Mr Lahim is the first Saudi lawyer to mount a court challenge to illegal actions by the religious police, also known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. In one pending case, Mr Lahim represents the family of a man allegedly beaten to death by members of the commission for possessing alcohol.
Unable to attend the ceremony in London last week, Mr Lahim prepared remarks that were read at the event.
“This award is an acknowledgement of the hundreds of human rights activists in Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It is also a recognition of the work of brave writers who have spoken against Islamist extremists and their calls for violence.”
Christoph Wilcke, a senior researcher on Saudi Arabia at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the award recognises that “Lahim fights for the rights of his fellow citizens against arbitrary and unjust rulings.
“He is at the forefront of the struggle to put into effect the kind of judicial reforms that King Abdullah has announced.”
Prior to his law career, Mr Lahim wrote about human rights as a newspaper columnist. He holds a degree in sharia from Imam Muhammad bin Saud University in Riyadh.
In 2004, Mr Lahim was the lead defence lawyer for three political reformists who were put on trial after advocating that Saudi Arabia become a constitutional monarchy.
Jailed in late 2004, he was kept in solitary confinement until he and his clients were pardoned by King Abdullah in 2005.
Mr Lahim, who received another human rights award this year from the American Bar Association, came to international prominence in 2007 when he took up the appeal of a woman from Qatif in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province who had been sentenced by a Saudi court to 90 lashings after being gang-raped.
Her punishment was for an act that preceded the rape: being in a car alone with a man who was not related to her, which is illegal in Saudi Arabia.
An appeals court increased the woman’s sentence to 200 lashings and six months in jail. In Dec 2007, King Abdullah set aside the woman’s sentence after the case drew international criticism.
In a recent interview in his Riyadh office, with walls featuring pictures of famous human right defenders, including Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Mr Lahim said he had sued members of the religious police to establish the principle that no one is above the law.
Most commission members, he said, “still think that they are above the law. But keeping the pressure on them, especially if some of them are punished, will have a very big effect. It will deter them”.
The commission recently announced that it was establishing a department to monitor its members’ actions.
The Saudi press did not take note of Mr Lahim’s award, except for Al Watan columnist Abdullah al Mutairi, who called the lawyer “an important phenomenon in modern Saudi history as he… values human rights awareness”.
Mr Mutairi said it “is wrong to believe that we are perfect and we’ll continue to be perfect, self-praising ourselves and closing off our minds and souls from any criticism that might help us uncover flaws”.
Neither of Saudi Arabia’s two human rights societies publicly welcomed Mr Lahim’s award. “I was expecting the [government-appointed] Human Rights Commission to call and congratulate me at the least, but they didn’t,” he said.
The French honour Ms Fassi received gives her the title of Knight in the Order of Academic Palms.
Raised in Mecca, Ms Fassi said she learnt to speak French as a child while studying in Lebanon.
She has given lectures about Saudi culture to French audiences, including one at the French Embassy in Riyadh, about Maidan Saleh. That is the Saudi site of the pre-Islamic Nabataean culture, which is Ms Fassi’s academic speciality.
Ms Fassi’s doctorate thesis, titled Women in Pre-Islamic Arabia: Nabataea, found that women in this urbanised society, whose capital was at Petra in South Jordan, had a high degree of independence, conducting legal and business activities on their own.
This status contrasts with current restrictions on Saudi women, who need a male guardian to obtain a business licence, travel abroad and make contracts.
In a recent interview, Ms Fassi, who is an assistant professor at King Saud University, said she had never been told why she had been barred from the classroom since 2000.
Ms Fassi, who writes a regular newspaper column and is active in promoting women’s rights, said she goes to the university every day even though she cannot lecture.
“I’m the only professor in the female section of the department graduated from outside Saudi Arabia,” she said, adding that she hopes the French award will have “a positive effect” on her situation.
“Just a few months ago,” she said, “the king himself initiated bonuses for those who receive international awards.”
cmurphy@thenational.ae
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Will mere talking bring about peace?
Last week, it was the head of Roman Catholicism playing host to three days of discussion between Islamic and Catholic scholars in the marble halls of the Vatican.
This week, it was Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah at the United Nations in New York, continuing his campaign to promote religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue.
At the heart of all this ecumenical fervour is one question: does talking matter?
Few would disagree, of course, that talking usually is better than not talking.
Moreover, few would challenge the declaration of the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng, which has become a kind of ecumenical rallying cry in the post-September 11 world: “There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions.”
Yet anyone who has been in an intimate relationship with another human being knows that the quality of the talk and dialogue – and the actions that follow – make the difference.
For the importance of choosing words carefully, a case in point is Pope Benedict XVI, who presided over last week’s Roman Catholic-Muslim forum.
For the Vatican, the gathering was largely an exercise in damage control. The pope’s 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a Byzantine Christian emperor in reference to the Prophet Mohammed ignited a firestorm of criticism.
Some 138 Muslim scholars and clerics issued an open letter protesting about the pontiff’s statement and urging dialogue. They were soon joined by hundreds of other Muslim leaders. A Vatican invitation for dialogue followed.
Still, Pope Benedict has never apologised for what he said in Regensburg; he has said only that he is sorry that people were offended by it , which to many Muslims, only compounded the insult.
The affront still rankles, said Ibrahim Kalin, one of 24 Muslim scholars and clerics who participated in the Vatican forum and praised the meeting. “It was a shock that we haven’t completely recovered from,” he said.
Despite a 15-point joint declaration at the conclusion of the Vatican forum that affirmed all that Islam and Roman Catholicism hold in common instead of conflict, a leading American Catholic cleric who has spoken to Pope Benedict many times said he, unlike his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, had never really understood Islam.
“He doesn’t see it as organically linked to Christianity and Judaism,” said the cleric, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But he’ll do the right political thing.”
The limitation on all talk of harmony is the pope’s theology, said Paul F Knitter, a prominent ecumenist and a Catholic.
The pope, in a 2007 Vatican proclamation, said Catholic Christianity was truer than Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or even Protestant Christianity, said Prof Knitter, the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The articulation was considered unusual for a modern pope.
“He sincerely wants to promote better relations with Islam, but it’s not possible on the basis of the theology he espouses,” Prof Knitter said, alluding to a 2007 Vatican proclamations that Roman Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation. The statement was widely viewed as a move away from a period of more open dialogue with other faiths.
If Pope Benedict illustrates the consequences of ill-chosen words, King Abdullah’s trip to the UN underscores the risks of talking but having too little to show for it.
Like his trip to a similar interfaith conference in Madrid in July, the 84-year-old Saudi monarch’s appearance at the UN reflected his determination to repair the damage done to Islam’s image by Islamic militants.
Saudi officials said it also reflected his efforts to put pressure on extremists inside Saudi Arabia’s dominant Wahhabi religious establishment to moderate their views.
Images of the King greeting the pope at the Vatican last year and speaking face-to-face with Rabbis in Madrid in July were televised in the kingdom and were unprecedented for a Saudi monarch.
Yet back in Saudi Arabia, there appeared to be little evidence the strategy was working, which may be one reason the king was not invited to the Vatican to participate in last week’s forum or asked to put together the invitation list. Human rights organisations have criticised Saudi Arabia for a severe lack of religious freedom inside the country. Although there has been some easing on the practice of faith by some Muslim minorities, including Sufis and Shia, non-Muslims are strictly banned from practising their faith or even possessing its symbols and artefacts.
Although up to a million Catholics live in Saudi Arabia, there is not one church in the country.
Critics of the Saudi government say there is nothing wrong with King Abdullah talking about interfaith harmony. The problem, they argue, is his use of international stages to promote what he so far has been unable to do at home.
Does this mean all interfaith talk is ill-fated, cynical beyond repair and destined to collapse under the weight of long-held grievances and mutual misunderstanding?
Hardly, said Mr Ibrahim Kalin, assistant professor at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington.
Mr Kalin recalled this week the reply of the head of the Muslim delegation in Rome, Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, when asked about Pope Benedict’s statements in Regensburg.
“Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered a ‘I have a dream’ speech, not a ‘I have a complaint’ speech,” Mr Ceric said. “Let us do the same.”
This week, it was Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah at the United Nations in New York, continuing his campaign to promote religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue.
At the heart of all this ecumenical fervour is one question: does talking matter?
Few would disagree, of course, that talking usually is better than not talking.
Moreover, few would challenge the declaration of the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng, which has become a kind of ecumenical rallying cry in the post-September 11 world: “There will be no peace among the nations without peace among the religions. There will be no peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions.”
Yet anyone who has been in an intimate relationship with another human being knows that the quality of the talk and dialogue – and the actions that follow – make the difference.
For the importance of choosing words carefully, a case in point is Pope Benedict XVI, who presided over last week’s Roman Catholic-Muslim forum.
For the Vatican, the gathering was largely an exercise in damage control. The pope’s 2006 speech in Regensburg, Germany, in which he quoted a Byzantine Christian emperor in reference to the Prophet Mohammed ignited a firestorm of criticism.
Some 138 Muslim scholars and clerics issued an open letter protesting about the pontiff’s statement and urging dialogue. They were soon joined by hundreds of other Muslim leaders. A Vatican invitation for dialogue followed.
Still, Pope Benedict has never apologised for what he said in Regensburg; he has said only that he is sorry that people were offended by it , which to many Muslims, only compounded the insult.
The affront still rankles, said Ibrahim Kalin, one of 24 Muslim scholars and clerics who participated in the Vatican forum and praised the meeting. “It was a shock that we haven’t completely recovered from,” he said.
Despite a 15-point joint declaration at the conclusion of the Vatican forum that affirmed all that Islam and Roman Catholicism hold in common instead of conflict, a leading American Catholic cleric who has spoken to Pope Benedict many times said he, unlike his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, had never really understood Islam.
“He doesn’t see it as organically linked to Christianity and Judaism,” said the cleric, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But he’ll do the right political thing.”
The limitation on all talk of harmony is the pope’s theology, said Paul F Knitter, a prominent ecumenist and a Catholic.
The pope, in a 2007 Vatican proclamation, said Catholic Christianity was truer than Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or even Protestant Christianity, said Prof Knitter, the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in New York. The articulation was considered unusual for a modern pope.
“He sincerely wants to promote better relations with Islam, but it’s not possible on the basis of the theology he espouses,” Prof Knitter said, alluding to a 2007 Vatican proclamations that Roman Catholicism provides the only true path to salvation. The statement was widely viewed as a move away from a period of more open dialogue with other faiths.
If Pope Benedict illustrates the consequences of ill-chosen words, King Abdullah’s trip to the UN underscores the risks of talking but having too little to show for it.
Like his trip to a similar interfaith conference in Madrid in July, the 84-year-old Saudi monarch’s appearance at the UN reflected his determination to repair the damage done to Islam’s image by Islamic militants.
Saudi officials said it also reflected his efforts to put pressure on extremists inside Saudi Arabia’s dominant Wahhabi religious establishment to moderate their views.
Images of the King greeting the pope at the Vatican last year and speaking face-to-face with Rabbis in Madrid in July were televised in the kingdom and were unprecedented for a Saudi monarch.
Yet back in Saudi Arabia, there appeared to be little evidence the strategy was working, which may be one reason the king was not invited to the Vatican to participate in last week’s forum or asked to put together the invitation list. Human rights organisations have criticised Saudi Arabia for a severe lack of religious freedom inside the country. Although there has been some easing on the practice of faith by some Muslim minorities, including Sufis and Shia, non-Muslims are strictly banned from practising their faith or even possessing its symbols and artefacts.
Although up to a million Catholics live in Saudi Arabia, there is not one church in the country.
Critics of the Saudi government say there is nothing wrong with King Abdullah talking about interfaith harmony. The problem, they argue, is his use of international stages to promote what he so far has been unable to do at home.
Does this mean all interfaith talk is ill-fated, cynical beyond repair and destined to collapse under the weight of long-held grievances and mutual misunderstanding?
Hardly, said Mr Ibrahim Kalin, assistant professor at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington.
Mr Kalin recalled this week the reply of the head of the Muslim delegation in Rome, Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, when asked about Pope Benedict’s statements in Regensburg.
“Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered a ‘I have a dream’ speech, not a ‘I have a complaint’ speech,” Mr Ceric said. “Let us do the same.”
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
The Saudi Arabia that the Middle East needs is finally emerging
In 1979, a group of religious zealots led by Juhayman al Uteybi stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca to herald the dawn of a new, more intransigent Islamic age, leading to an existential crisis for the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. The theological and political challenge that Uteybi posed to the House of Saud was so tremendous that the royals were forced to obtain the blessing of influential clerics for an assault on the Mosque to dislodge the militants.
This episode of Saudi history is brilliantly recounted in Yaroslav Trofimov’s gripping book The Siege of Mecca. Ultimately, after a two-week-long stand-off, the House of Saud prevailed over Uteybi’s rebellion, but as princes cited by Trofimov bitterly admitted, “the ulema [they had turned to] essentially asked al Saud to adopt Juhayman’s agenda in exchange for their help in getting rid of Juhayman himself”.
Sadly, the trajectory of Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and the 1990s suggests that Saudi Arabia indeed altered its course to accommodate its most conservative elements. As the leading Saudi experts Afshin Molavi and Jean-Francois Seznec wrote, the terms of the bargain were too favourable to those who opposed genuine modernisation: “While the king and the civil service would still control the hardware – defence, finance, oil, and foreign policy – he essentially handed over the software – the education system and the courts – to conservative forces.” Saudi leaders would come to regret this compromise.
Today’s Saudi Arabia seems set on a wildly different course. While the hardware remains firmly in the hands of the ruling elites, the state is reasserting ownership of the “software” through gradual educational and judicial reform. Clerics are gradually losing their dominant say in courts and classrooms while the civil service and merchant class, the country’s lead reformers, are empowered.
Plainly, without the leadership of King Abdullah – whom many Saudis regret came to power too late – this progress would not have happened. At a time when his country was facing threats from radicals at home and challenges abroad, his personal credibility shifted the debate from whether the Saud family could still hold the reins of the country to whether the progress of the past few years will be sustained.
King Abdullah, in his long years as second in command, was considered an advocate for greater Saudi sovereignty and independence from the United States in decision making. Since taking charge of the kingdom, he has demonstrated so. Abdullah now is a more independent actor than his predecessors, in part because the cozy security alliance with Washington has eroded considerably. A former US ambassador to Riyadh rather cheekily told me that the US is locked in a monogamous marriage with Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis can still pick three other partners.
Indeed, US-Saudi relations have changed since 9/11. For domestic reasons, the Saudis have decided that relying on Americans to provide physical and strategic security isn’t working any more, and has, paradoxically, increased the risks to the royal family’s survival, not decreased them. Confidence has weakened for regional reasons, too: the US has badly botched its Iraq project; seems unable to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, and incapable of securing Israeli acceptance of the Arab Peace Initiative, for which Abdullah put his personal prestige on the line.
Ironically, the logic of the relationship is now being turned on its head. It is doubtful that the US could have secured the cooperation of the Sunni Awakening Councils in Iraq without active Saudi participation. And on the two hottest battlefields against al Qa’eda today, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Saudi involvement is preciously needed to splinter the Taliban from the al Qa’eda core.
Saudi Arabia is a more autonomous player for a second reason: the great geopolitical shift that is occurring in the world. The rise of Asian consumers makes the Saudis less susceptible to leverage or pressure from their Western partners. One can already see a more evenly balanced set of “special” relationships between Saudi Arabia and its key customers, although it is doubtful that any of these new friends could provide the security guarantees that are implicit in the US-Saudi strategic partnership.
In his quest to diversify his alliances, Abdullah has reached out to Russia, a fierce enemy during its Communist days, China, whose boom greatly depends on energy from the Gulf, various Asian countries, and Europe. And, in an effort to cultivate goodwill abroad, Abdullah has embarked on a campaign toward non-Muslim religious leaders, meeting the Pope to the great but quiet dismay of fundamentalists at home.
When it comes to oil policy, Saudi Arabia has been the responsible actor. Now that global recession is in sight, Saudi Arabia realises the long-term risk of cutting production to sustain prices in the short-term as demanded by Iran and Venezuela. This certainly comes at a financial cost to the kingdom, but its financial power and ambitious industrial policies have just made it a key player in designing the new global economic landscape. Indeed, as far as world governance goes, with a $500 billion economy (the largest in the Middle East), large currency reserves and trade surplus, Saudi Arabia is now recognised as a pivotal power. The head of the World Bank even included it in the newly-envisaged Group of Fourteen.
The demons of Uteybi’s days continue to haunt Saudi Arabia, but this time, complacency and complicity have given way to a determined fight against extremism. Abdullah’s transformative reign has used modernisation to its best.
This episode of Saudi history is brilliantly recounted in Yaroslav Trofimov’s gripping book The Siege of Mecca. Ultimately, after a two-week-long stand-off, the House of Saud prevailed over Uteybi’s rebellion, but as princes cited by Trofimov bitterly admitted, “the ulema [they had turned to] essentially asked al Saud to adopt Juhayman’s agenda in exchange for their help in getting rid of Juhayman himself”.
Sadly, the trajectory of Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and the 1990s suggests that Saudi Arabia indeed altered its course to accommodate its most conservative elements. As the leading Saudi experts Afshin Molavi and Jean-Francois Seznec wrote, the terms of the bargain were too favourable to those who opposed genuine modernisation: “While the king and the civil service would still control the hardware – defence, finance, oil, and foreign policy – he essentially handed over the software – the education system and the courts – to conservative forces.” Saudi leaders would come to regret this compromise.
Today’s Saudi Arabia seems set on a wildly different course. While the hardware remains firmly in the hands of the ruling elites, the state is reasserting ownership of the “software” through gradual educational and judicial reform. Clerics are gradually losing their dominant say in courts and classrooms while the civil service and merchant class, the country’s lead reformers, are empowered.
Plainly, without the leadership of King Abdullah – whom many Saudis regret came to power too late – this progress would not have happened. At a time when his country was facing threats from radicals at home and challenges abroad, his personal credibility shifted the debate from whether the Saud family could still hold the reins of the country to whether the progress of the past few years will be sustained.
King Abdullah, in his long years as second in command, was considered an advocate for greater Saudi sovereignty and independence from the United States in decision making. Since taking charge of the kingdom, he has demonstrated so. Abdullah now is a more independent actor than his predecessors, in part because the cozy security alliance with Washington has eroded considerably. A former US ambassador to Riyadh rather cheekily told me that the US is locked in a monogamous marriage with Saudi Arabia, but the Saudis can still pick three other partners.
Indeed, US-Saudi relations have changed since 9/11. For domestic reasons, the Saudis have decided that relying on Americans to provide physical and strategic security isn’t working any more, and has, paradoxically, increased the risks to the royal family’s survival, not decreased them. Confidence has weakened for regional reasons, too: the US has badly botched its Iraq project; seems unable to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, and incapable of securing Israeli acceptance of the Arab Peace Initiative, for which Abdullah put his personal prestige on the line.
Ironically, the logic of the relationship is now being turned on its head. It is doubtful that the US could have secured the cooperation of the Sunni Awakening Councils in Iraq without active Saudi participation. And on the two hottest battlefields against al Qa’eda today, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Saudi involvement is preciously needed to splinter the Taliban from the al Qa’eda core.
Saudi Arabia is a more autonomous player for a second reason: the great geopolitical shift that is occurring in the world. The rise of Asian consumers makes the Saudis less susceptible to leverage or pressure from their Western partners. One can already see a more evenly balanced set of “special” relationships between Saudi Arabia and its key customers, although it is doubtful that any of these new friends could provide the security guarantees that are implicit in the US-Saudi strategic partnership.
In his quest to diversify his alliances, Abdullah has reached out to Russia, a fierce enemy during its Communist days, China, whose boom greatly depends on energy from the Gulf, various Asian countries, and Europe. And, in an effort to cultivate goodwill abroad, Abdullah has embarked on a campaign toward non-Muslim religious leaders, meeting the Pope to the great but quiet dismay of fundamentalists at home.
When it comes to oil policy, Saudi Arabia has been the responsible actor. Now that global recession is in sight, Saudi Arabia realises the long-term risk of cutting production to sustain prices in the short-term as demanded by Iran and Venezuela. This certainly comes at a financial cost to the kingdom, but its financial power and ambitious industrial policies have just made it a key player in designing the new global economic landscape. Indeed, as far as world governance goes, with a $500 billion economy (the largest in the Middle East), large currency reserves and trade surplus, Saudi Arabia is now recognised as a pivotal power. The head of the World Bank even included it in the newly-envisaged Group of Fourteen.
The demons of Uteybi’s days continue to haunt Saudi Arabia, but this time, complacency and complicity have given way to a determined fight against extremism. Abdullah’s transformative reign has used modernisation to its best.
Friday, 24 October 2008
Mayfair to Makkah
I watch the train to Cairo disappear and I feel I have indeed cut myself off from my friends and everyone I know. I love Egypt, but now it is Arabia that calls me. —Port Said, February 22, 1933
Mayfair to Makkah - Written by William Facey, Photographs courtesy of Angus Sladen
This portrait of Lady Evelyn was made a few years before her visit to Saudi Arabia.
Lady Evelyn Cobbold achieved celebrity at age 65, in 1933, when she became the first British-born Muslim woman to perform the pilgrimage to Makkah. She was a Scottish aristocrat, a grandmother and a Mayfair socialite, and an accomplished deerstalker, angler and gardener, and, uniquely, she was both a Muslim and an Arabic-speaker. Yet the story of her colorful career has been overlooked, as has her contribution to the literature of the Hajj. Nor has she been studied for what her life has to say about being a Muslim in a western society. On her 1933 pilgrimage, she became the first international traveler to record the buses that had recently begun service in Makkah.
She was not born into a Muslim family, yet Lady Evelyn claimed to have been a Muslim from as early as she could remember. She disclaimed any moment of conversion, and there is no record of her having formally converted before an imam. She wrote:
“As a child, I spent the winter months in a Moorish villa on a hill outside Algiers…. There I learned to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the Mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart…. Some years went by and I happened to be in Rome staying with some Italian friends when my host asked if I would like to visit the Pope. Of course I was thrilled…. When His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Moslem. What possessed me I don’t pretend to know, as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the Faith.”
Evelyn was born in Edinburgh in 1867, the eldest child of Charles Adolphus Murray, Seventh Earl of Dunmore, and Lady Gertrude Coke, daughter of the Second Earl of Leicester. Permanently short of money, and with an incurable wanderlust, Lord Dunmore found it both cheap and congenial to take his family to North Africa every winter. Evelyn and her siblings, as they arrived, thus grew up in the company of Algerian and Egyptian nurses and household staff. The impact on young Evelyn was profound. Steeped in the culture and language of everyday life in the Arab Muslim world, she came to feel completely at ease and at home there.
For a relatively poor aristocrat, Evelyn married rather late, at age 24, to John Dupuis Cobbold, scion of a wealthy brewing family in eastern England. They met in Cairo and were married there in April 1891. At her new home in East Anglia, she faced a future of domesticity, relieved by the frequent travels at home and abroad typical of her wealthy contemporaries. Three children arrived between 1893 and 1900, but it is fairly clear that Lady Evelyn found it hard to settle. And the clues to her restlessness have to do with Islam and the Arab world.
Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba, shown here during one of the visits to England (probably 1935) by HRH Prince Sa’ud ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Wahba stands on the left and slightly behind the prince; Wahba wrote the original introduction to Lady Evelyn’s Pilgrimage to Mecca. Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba.
An untitled poem she wrote in Cairo in 1889 already evinces a spiritual longing for meaning in life and an affinity with Islam. In it, she wrote:
… The vague longings that filled my soul, Took the form of a prayer I upward sped, To Him, the One, The Essence of All….
And the weird cadence of the Mueddin’s cry Bid the faithful prepare for the day that was nigh….
By 1900, Lady Evelyn was journeying without her husband. She was back in North Africa in 1911, at the age of 43, traveling in Egypt with a female companion. Her book about the trip—Wayfarers in the Libyan Desert, published in 1912 —is a revealing diary, forthright in its admiration for Islam.
From this point on, it becomes increasingly plain that she regarded herself as a Muslim. She was making regular winter visits to Egypt, and a series of letters in Arabic survives from 1914 and 1915, from Arab friends there and in Syria. Some address her as “Our sister in Islam, Lady Zainab,” using her adopted Muslim name. Her friendship from 1915 with the British Muslim Marmaduke Pickthall, who produced one of the most respected renderings of the Qur’an into English, provides further testimony.
By the 1920’s, anecdotal information suggests that Lady Evelyn’s attachment to Islam had become a cause of estrangement from the Cobbold family, and in 1922, she and her husband formally separated. She received a generous financial settlement, including the deer forest of Glencarron in the Highlands, making her a very wealthy woman in her own right. For much of the 1920’s, she was occupied by a cavalcade of grandchildren and by the field sports at which she excelled. But in 1929 her husband died, and it seems that she now began seriously to contemplate performing the pilgrimage to Makkah.
Lady Evelyn announced her intention to perform the Hajj to Saudi Arabia’s minister in London, Hafiz Wahba, who wrote to King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in Riyadh requesting formal permission. But, typically for her, she did not wait for a reply, relying instead on a social contact in London to send a letter of introduction to Harry St. John (‘Abd Allah) Philby in Jiddah. Philby had became a Muslim in 1930, and he and his wife, Dora, duly received their unsolicited guest. They introduced her to Jiddah’s small expatriate social circle and even invited the prince (and future king) Faisal to tea to meet the prospective pilgrim. While awaiting permission from the king for Lady Evelyn to go Makkah, Philby arranged for her to travel by car to Madinah, organizing accommodation with a family there.
February 28, 1933 The King is away at Riyadh, his capital in Nejd, sixteen days’ camel ride from here, so I fear he will not get the letter his Minister in London wrote him for some time…. Till that letter reaches the King, I must possess my soul in patience, and my time is pleasantly spent bathing in the warm sea within the coral reefs, for fear of sharks, or in motor drives in the desert….
March 2 How I envy the pilgrims we meet on their way to Mecca, while we return to the social life of Jeddah, which would be very pleasant if one were not aware of the mysterious City of Islam hidden in the hills only a few miles from us. Why do we always long for the unattainable, for the Blue Bird which hovers just beyond our reach?
March 9 The Emir Faisal arrived punctually at five o’clock…. It was impressive to see his tall figure enter the doorway clad in a brown and gold Abba over a flowing white robe and the picturesque headdress of Nejd, the Koffeya of diaphanous white bound round his head by black and gold chords—called the Aghal…. The Emir is slender and exceedingly graceful in his movements and, like most Nejd Arabs, has an air of distinction and good breeding….
March 15 Two hundred and fifty miles [400 km] from Jeddah to Medina took us fifteen hours to accomplish and I take off my hat to the little Ford that gallantly carried us through those sandy wastes…. Besides the pilgrims on camels, we met many on foot, toiling slowly through the scorching desert with water jugs in their hands clad in their Ihram (or two towels), and, as they were bare headed, many carried umbrellas. Ten days is the usual time it takes a camel to accomplish the journey between Medina and Jeddah and three weeks for the pilgrim on foot….
As a visiting notable, Lady Evelyn found conditions were not nearly as hard as they were for ordinary pilgrims. The Saudis treated her with extreme courtesy, as befitted her status. And once permission arrived, she would be allowed to go to Makkah—some 70 kilometers (45 mi) away—by car, Philby once again providing her with a vehicle, guide and driver.
March 12 Today the news has come through that I am permitted to do the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit Medina. I had for so long lived in alternate fits of hope and despair, that I can scarcely credit that my great wish is at last to be fulfilled. Preparations for my journey are in the hands of my host…; while I prepare…my pilgrim dress which consists of a black crepe skirt, very full, and a cape and hood in one, to be worn over ordinary dress when I visit Medina, also a black crepe veil entirely obscuring my features; but for Mecca I shall be entirely in white, no colour is allowed in any garment….
Lady Evelyn arrived in the Hijaz at a historic juncture in Saudi Arabian history. Only just before her arrival, in September 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had been proclaimed. Oil had not yet been discovered, and the world economy was mired in the Great Depression. The country had no source of income apart from pilgrimage receipts, and in 1933 pilgrims from abroad would slump to an all-time low of just 20,000—down from around 100,000 in the late 1920’s. But economic salvation was in the offing. Lady Evelyn’s visit to Jiddah coincided with the presence of American and British oil company negotiators, and in May 1933 King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz would sign the key concession agreement with the Americans that heralded the end of hard times for the Saudi economy.
March 2 We return to Jeddah and dine at the New Hotel, which was where the American engineers, who have come to try to obtain the oil concessions from the King, are now staying. Their wives, Mrs. [Lloyd] Hamilton and Mrs. [Karl] Twitchell, welcome us and give us an excellent dinner, and the party includes Mr. [Stephen] Longrigg, the English representative of the Iraq Oil Company, who is also here trying to get the concession. Rivalry does not appear to spoil the friendly relations existing between all parties….
The fact that her son-in-law was a director of the Bank of England may also have played a role in winning permission for Lady Evelyn to make her pioneering Hajj, according to Sir Andrew Ryan, then Britain’s minister to Saudi Arabia, who cast a somewhat jaundiced eye on her visit. “Lady Evelyn Cobbold…has been even more successful than anticipated,” he reported. “…If [King] Ibn Saud receives her, her cup of blessing will be overflowing.” In the event, Lady Evelyn did not meet the king, although she saw him when he arrived by car on the day of the Standing at ‘Arafat, a key ritual of the Hajj.
March 26 I am in the Mosque of Mecca, and for a few seconds I am lost to my surroundings because of the wonder of it. We are walking on white marble through a great vault whose ceiling is a full fifty feet above us, and enter pillared cloisters holding the arched roof and surrounding an immense quadrangle…. I had never imagined anything so stupendous…. We walk on to the Holy of Holies, the house of Allah [the Ka’bah] rising in simple majesty. It would require a master pen to describe the scene, poignant in its intensity of the great concourse of humanity of which I was one small unit, completely lost to their surroundings in a fervour of religious enthusiasm…. I felt caught up in a strong wave of spiritual exaltation….
Pilgrimage to Mecca, published in 1934, is Lady Evelyn’s fascinating account of her journey to the holy cities. As much a record of an interior experience of faith as a conventional travelogue, the book is remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. It takes the form of a diary, punctuated with lengthy digressions intended to help her readers understand Islam. They address topics such as the Qur’an, the life of the Prophet, Islamic history and science, the position of women, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s achievements and Islamic principles relating to warfare and tolerance.
March 21 Having discoursed on the subject of tolerance, we pass on to discuss the crisis the world is now facing, and the emancipation of women. The sheikhs show some amusement, tempered with admiration at the methods adopted by the Western woman to win herself a place in the sun; their sympathy is all on the side of the ladies. Though I occasionally caught a twinkle in the eye of Sid Ahmed, and both the sheikhs often smiled, I never heard them give way to loud laughter….
Most remarkable about her book, however, is that as a lone female Muslim, she was able to witness something veiled from every western traveler before her: the female side of domestic life in the two holy cities. This, and her religious commitment, set the account apart from all other English-language descriptions of the Hijaz that had gone before.
March 27 My hostess had already initiated me into the secrets of the harem or women’s quarters; the bakehouse where the bread is baked to supply the needs of the large company at present inhabiting the house; the great kitchen where she, the ladies and slaves all help in cooking and preparing the food; the laundry where more slaves are busy washing; while the three pretty nieces are ironing and folding away the household linen; the work-room where they sit sewing and gossiping….
April 1 As I have been granted the great privilege of being received as a guest in this Mecca household I feel it is up to me to refute the false impressions that still exist in the West about the harem. Not only in this house, but in every harem I have visited in Arabia I have found my host with only one wife. Far from being a sensuous life of ease these ladies are busy with their household duties; at the same time living a happy, even a gay life, entertaining their friends and having their own amusements and festive occasions.
Uplifted but thoroughly exhausted by the rituals of the Hajj, Lady Evelyn received special dispensation from the king to end her pilgrimage before the usual culmination at the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, ‘Id al-Adha. Though she extols the egalitarianism of Islam and the way in which the Hajj symbolically makes all people equals before God, she was not averse to taking advantage of her social status. Her host at Makkah generously made available to her the entire roof of his rented house at Mina, where otherwise all his womenfolk would have slept for the sake of the cool night air. At the Standing at ‘Arafat, the same host invited her to share his tent, with its view of Jabal al-Rahmah, with his male guests. She readily accepted, not least because it was cooler, the women being consigned to a hot bell-shaped tent behind, where they could neither see nor be seen. When challenged by a pious passerby suspicious of her reading matter in the car on the way to ‘Arafat (it was Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta), her response was to declare robustly: “This is an English book, and I am an English Moslem and I am here on pilgrimage by permission of the King!” A lesser mortal might not have got away with it so easily. During her return voyage by sea, officials spared her the rigors of the full quarantine, giving her special quarters at Port Sudan and allowing her to leave after three days instead of the regulation five.
However, she revealed her fundamental sincerity while waiting to depart from Makkah on April 7 when, on her final return through the city, she found that she could not after all stomach Doughty because of his inability to fathom Islam. Instead, she took up the only other book she had brought with her, an Arabic Qur’an, and was “soon immersed in the beautiful sura ‘Light,’” she noted. She had found that, after all, the suspicious passerby might have had a point.
Even before she returned to London, the newspapers made her an instant celebrity. The popular press viewed her pilgrimage as something out of the Arabian Nights while, in 1934, the more serious papers gave Pilgrimage to Mecca a favorable reception.
But what sort of Muslim was Lady Evelyn, and how should we regard her today? Though clearly firm in her faith, there is no record, during her life at home, of strict performance of the five daily prayers, or of charity to the poor and needy. No doubt she had uttered the shahadah, or declaration of faith, on various occasions, and there is some anecdotal evidence of fasting during Ramadan. But, of the Five Pillars of Islam, going on the Hajj seems to have been the one to which that she paid the most attention.
There is a long history of British converts to Islam before her time, going back at least to the Crusades. But Lady Evelyn belongs in a later category: that of educated converts in Britain itself in the late 19th century. She was contemporary with various other eminent Muslims of this type—Abdullah Quilliam, Lord Headley, Lord Hothfield and Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, to name but a few.
Although Lady Evelyn lectured extensively in Britain about her book, there is no sign that she saw her faith as having special public and social implications. She apparently regarded Islam as a matter of private conviction and subscribed to it on her own terms. But there is no doubting that her faith was deeply held during her very long life. She lived for 30 years after her pilgrimage, dying in January 1963, one of the coldest months of the century in Britain. She was buried in arctic conditions but according to the precepts of Islam and, as she had stipulated, on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate.
Her interment symbolized her two worlds: A piper, so frozen that he was hardly able to walk, let alone perform, played “MacCrimmon’s Lament,” and the equally refrigerated imam of the Woking Mosque in London declaimed in Arabic the surah “Light,” which she had found so moving in Makkah. A verse from the same surah adorns the flat slab on her grave, over which the deer undoubtedly wander, just as she had wished.
William Facey (william.facey@arabia.uk.com) has spent his career as a museum consultant, writer and publisher on the Arabian Peninsula. He worked and traveled widely there during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and since then his books have established him as a well-known author on the region. He is currently director of Arabian Publishing Ltd., London.
Mayfair to Makkah - Written by William Facey, Photographs courtesy of Angus Sladen
This portrait of Lady Evelyn was made a few years before her visit to Saudi Arabia.
Lady Evelyn Cobbold achieved celebrity at age 65, in 1933, when she became the first British-born Muslim woman to perform the pilgrimage to Makkah. She was a Scottish aristocrat, a grandmother and a Mayfair socialite, and an accomplished deerstalker, angler and gardener, and, uniquely, she was both a Muslim and an Arabic-speaker. Yet the story of her colorful career has been overlooked, as has her contribution to the literature of the Hajj. Nor has she been studied for what her life has to say about being a Muslim in a western society. On her 1933 pilgrimage, she became the first international traveler to record the buses that had recently begun service in Makkah.
She was not born into a Muslim family, yet Lady Evelyn claimed to have been a Muslim from as early as she could remember. She disclaimed any moment of conversion, and there is no record of her having formally converted before an imam. She wrote:
“As a child, I spent the winter months in a Moorish villa on a hill outside Algiers…. There I learned to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the Mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart…. Some years went by and I happened to be in Rome staying with some Italian friends when my host asked if I would like to visit the Pope. Of course I was thrilled…. When His Holiness suddenly addressed me, asking if I was a Catholic, I was taken aback for a moment and then replied that I was a Moslem. What possessed me I don’t pretend to know, as I had not given a thought to Islam for many years. A match was lit and I then and there determined to read up and study the Faith.”
Evelyn was born in Edinburgh in 1867, the eldest child of Charles Adolphus Murray, Seventh Earl of Dunmore, and Lady Gertrude Coke, daughter of the Second Earl of Leicester. Permanently short of money, and with an incurable wanderlust, Lord Dunmore found it both cheap and congenial to take his family to North Africa every winter. Evelyn and her siblings, as they arrived, thus grew up in the company of Algerian and Egyptian nurses and household staff. The impact on young Evelyn was profound. Steeped in the culture and language of everyday life in the Arab Muslim world, she came to feel completely at ease and at home there.
For a relatively poor aristocrat, Evelyn married rather late, at age 24, to John Dupuis Cobbold, scion of a wealthy brewing family in eastern England. They met in Cairo and were married there in April 1891. At her new home in East Anglia, she faced a future of domesticity, relieved by the frequent travels at home and abroad typical of her wealthy contemporaries. Three children arrived between 1893 and 1900, but it is fairly clear that Lady Evelyn found it hard to settle. And the clues to her restlessness have to do with Islam and the Arab world.
Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba, shown here during one of the visits to England (probably 1935) by HRH Prince Sa’ud ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz. Wahba stands on the left and slightly behind the prince; Wahba wrote the original introduction to Lady Evelyn’s Pilgrimage to Mecca. Lady Evelyn’s permission to make her pilgrimage was arranged by Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in London, Shaykh Hafiz Wahba.
An untitled poem she wrote in Cairo in 1889 already evinces a spiritual longing for meaning in life and an affinity with Islam. In it, she wrote:
… The vague longings that filled my soul, Took the form of a prayer I upward sped, To Him, the One, The Essence of All….
And the weird cadence of the Mueddin’s cry Bid the faithful prepare for the day that was nigh….
By 1900, Lady Evelyn was journeying without her husband. She was back in North Africa in 1911, at the age of 43, traveling in Egypt with a female companion. Her book about the trip—Wayfarers in the Libyan Desert, published in 1912 —is a revealing diary, forthright in its admiration for Islam.
From this point on, it becomes increasingly plain that she regarded herself as a Muslim. She was making regular winter visits to Egypt, and a series of letters in Arabic survives from 1914 and 1915, from Arab friends there and in Syria. Some address her as “Our sister in Islam, Lady Zainab,” using her adopted Muslim name. Her friendship from 1915 with the British Muslim Marmaduke Pickthall, who produced one of the most respected renderings of the Qur’an into English, provides further testimony.
By the 1920’s, anecdotal information suggests that Lady Evelyn’s attachment to Islam had become a cause of estrangement from the Cobbold family, and in 1922, she and her husband formally separated. She received a generous financial settlement, including the deer forest of Glencarron in the Highlands, making her a very wealthy woman in her own right. For much of the 1920’s, she was occupied by a cavalcade of grandchildren and by the field sports at which she excelled. But in 1929 her husband died, and it seems that she now began seriously to contemplate performing the pilgrimage to Makkah.
Lady Evelyn announced her intention to perform the Hajj to Saudi Arabia’s minister in London, Hafiz Wahba, who wrote to King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz in Riyadh requesting formal permission. But, typically for her, she did not wait for a reply, relying instead on a social contact in London to send a letter of introduction to Harry St. John (‘Abd Allah) Philby in Jiddah. Philby had became a Muslim in 1930, and he and his wife, Dora, duly received their unsolicited guest. They introduced her to Jiddah’s small expatriate social circle and even invited the prince (and future king) Faisal to tea to meet the prospective pilgrim. While awaiting permission from the king for Lady Evelyn to go Makkah, Philby arranged for her to travel by car to Madinah, organizing accommodation with a family there.
February 28, 1933 The King is away at Riyadh, his capital in Nejd, sixteen days’ camel ride from here, so I fear he will not get the letter his Minister in London wrote him for some time…. Till that letter reaches the King, I must possess my soul in patience, and my time is pleasantly spent bathing in the warm sea within the coral reefs, for fear of sharks, or in motor drives in the desert….
March 2 How I envy the pilgrims we meet on their way to Mecca, while we return to the social life of Jeddah, which would be very pleasant if one were not aware of the mysterious City of Islam hidden in the hills only a few miles from us. Why do we always long for the unattainable, for the Blue Bird which hovers just beyond our reach?
March 9 The Emir Faisal arrived punctually at five o’clock…. It was impressive to see his tall figure enter the doorway clad in a brown and gold Abba over a flowing white robe and the picturesque headdress of Nejd, the Koffeya of diaphanous white bound round his head by black and gold chords—called the Aghal…. The Emir is slender and exceedingly graceful in his movements and, like most Nejd Arabs, has an air of distinction and good breeding….
March 15 Two hundred and fifty miles [400 km] from Jeddah to Medina took us fifteen hours to accomplish and I take off my hat to the little Ford that gallantly carried us through those sandy wastes…. Besides the pilgrims on camels, we met many on foot, toiling slowly through the scorching desert with water jugs in their hands clad in their Ihram (or two towels), and, as they were bare headed, many carried umbrellas. Ten days is the usual time it takes a camel to accomplish the journey between Medina and Jeddah and three weeks for the pilgrim on foot….
As a visiting notable, Lady Evelyn found conditions were not nearly as hard as they were for ordinary pilgrims. The Saudis treated her with extreme courtesy, as befitted her status. And once permission arrived, she would be allowed to go to Makkah—some 70 kilometers (45 mi) away—by car, Philby once again providing her with a vehicle, guide and driver.
March 12 Today the news has come through that I am permitted to do the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit Medina. I had for so long lived in alternate fits of hope and despair, that I can scarcely credit that my great wish is at last to be fulfilled. Preparations for my journey are in the hands of my host…; while I prepare…my pilgrim dress which consists of a black crepe skirt, very full, and a cape and hood in one, to be worn over ordinary dress when I visit Medina, also a black crepe veil entirely obscuring my features; but for Mecca I shall be entirely in white, no colour is allowed in any garment….
Lady Evelyn arrived in the Hijaz at a historic juncture in Saudi Arabian history. Only just before her arrival, in September 1932, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia had been proclaimed. Oil had not yet been discovered, and the world economy was mired in the Great Depression. The country had no source of income apart from pilgrimage receipts, and in 1933 pilgrims from abroad would slump to an all-time low of just 20,000—down from around 100,000 in the late 1920’s. But economic salvation was in the offing. Lady Evelyn’s visit to Jiddah coincided with the presence of American and British oil company negotiators, and in May 1933 King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz would sign the key concession agreement with the Americans that heralded the end of hard times for the Saudi economy.
March 2 We return to Jeddah and dine at the New Hotel, which was where the American engineers, who have come to try to obtain the oil concessions from the King, are now staying. Their wives, Mrs. [Lloyd] Hamilton and Mrs. [Karl] Twitchell, welcome us and give us an excellent dinner, and the party includes Mr. [Stephen] Longrigg, the English representative of the Iraq Oil Company, who is also here trying to get the concession. Rivalry does not appear to spoil the friendly relations existing between all parties….
The fact that her son-in-law was a director of the Bank of England may also have played a role in winning permission for Lady Evelyn to make her pioneering Hajj, according to Sir Andrew Ryan, then Britain’s minister to Saudi Arabia, who cast a somewhat jaundiced eye on her visit. “Lady Evelyn Cobbold…has been even more successful than anticipated,” he reported. “…If [King] Ibn Saud receives her, her cup of blessing will be overflowing.” In the event, Lady Evelyn did not meet the king, although she saw him when he arrived by car on the day of the Standing at ‘Arafat, a key ritual of the Hajj.
March 26 I am in the Mosque of Mecca, and for a few seconds I am lost to my surroundings because of the wonder of it. We are walking on white marble through a great vault whose ceiling is a full fifty feet above us, and enter pillared cloisters holding the arched roof and surrounding an immense quadrangle…. I had never imagined anything so stupendous…. We walk on to the Holy of Holies, the house of Allah [the Ka’bah] rising in simple majesty. It would require a master pen to describe the scene, poignant in its intensity of the great concourse of humanity of which I was one small unit, completely lost to their surroundings in a fervour of religious enthusiasm…. I felt caught up in a strong wave of spiritual exaltation….
Pilgrimage to Mecca, published in 1934, is Lady Evelyn’s fascinating account of her journey to the holy cities. As much a record of an interior experience of faith as a conventional travelogue, the book is remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. It takes the form of a diary, punctuated with lengthy digressions intended to help her readers understand Islam. They address topics such as the Qur’an, the life of the Prophet, Islamic history and science, the position of women, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s achievements and Islamic principles relating to warfare and tolerance.
March 21 Having discoursed on the subject of tolerance, we pass on to discuss the crisis the world is now facing, and the emancipation of women. The sheikhs show some amusement, tempered with admiration at the methods adopted by the Western woman to win herself a place in the sun; their sympathy is all on the side of the ladies. Though I occasionally caught a twinkle in the eye of Sid Ahmed, and both the sheikhs often smiled, I never heard them give way to loud laughter….
Most remarkable about her book, however, is that as a lone female Muslim, she was able to witness something veiled from every western traveler before her: the female side of domestic life in the two holy cities. This, and her religious commitment, set the account apart from all other English-language descriptions of the Hijaz that had gone before.
March 27 My hostess had already initiated me into the secrets of the harem or women’s quarters; the bakehouse where the bread is baked to supply the needs of the large company at present inhabiting the house; the great kitchen where she, the ladies and slaves all help in cooking and preparing the food; the laundry where more slaves are busy washing; while the three pretty nieces are ironing and folding away the household linen; the work-room where they sit sewing and gossiping….
April 1 As I have been granted the great privilege of being received as a guest in this Mecca household I feel it is up to me to refute the false impressions that still exist in the West about the harem. Not only in this house, but in every harem I have visited in Arabia I have found my host with only one wife. Far from being a sensuous life of ease these ladies are busy with their household duties; at the same time living a happy, even a gay life, entertaining their friends and having their own amusements and festive occasions.
Uplifted but thoroughly exhausted by the rituals of the Hajj, Lady Evelyn received special dispensation from the king to end her pilgrimage before the usual culmination at the three-day Feast of Sacrifice, ‘Id al-Adha. Though she extols the egalitarianism of Islam and the way in which the Hajj symbolically makes all people equals before God, she was not averse to taking advantage of her social status. Her host at Makkah generously made available to her the entire roof of his rented house at Mina, where otherwise all his womenfolk would have slept for the sake of the cool night air. At the Standing at ‘Arafat, the same host invited her to share his tent, with its view of Jabal al-Rahmah, with his male guests. She readily accepted, not least because it was cooler, the women being consigned to a hot bell-shaped tent behind, where they could neither see nor be seen. When challenged by a pious passerby suspicious of her reading matter in the car on the way to ‘Arafat (it was Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta), her response was to declare robustly: “This is an English book, and I am an English Moslem and I am here on pilgrimage by permission of the King!” A lesser mortal might not have got away with it so easily. During her return voyage by sea, officials spared her the rigors of the full quarantine, giving her special quarters at Port Sudan and allowing her to leave after three days instead of the regulation five.
However, she revealed her fundamental sincerity while waiting to depart from Makkah on April 7 when, on her final return through the city, she found that she could not after all stomach Doughty because of his inability to fathom Islam. Instead, she took up the only other book she had brought with her, an Arabic Qur’an, and was “soon immersed in the beautiful sura ‘Light,’” she noted. She had found that, after all, the suspicious passerby might have had a point.
Even before she returned to London, the newspapers made her an instant celebrity. The popular press viewed her pilgrimage as something out of the Arabian Nights while, in 1934, the more serious papers gave Pilgrimage to Mecca a favorable reception.
But what sort of Muslim was Lady Evelyn, and how should we regard her today? Though clearly firm in her faith, there is no record, during her life at home, of strict performance of the five daily prayers, or of charity to the poor and needy. No doubt she had uttered the shahadah, or declaration of faith, on various occasions, and there is some anecdotal evidence of fasting during Ramadan. But, of the Five Pillars of Islam, going on the Hajj seems to have been the one to which that she paid the most attention.
There is a long history of British converts to Islam before her time, going back at least to the Crusades. But Lady Evelyn belongs in a later category: that of educated converts in Britain itself in the late 19th century. She was contemporary with various other eminent Muslims of this type—Abdullah Quilliam, Lord Headley, Lord Hothfield and Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, to name but a few.
Although Lady Evelyn lectured extensively in Britain about her book, there is no sign that she saw her faith as having special public and social implications. She apparently regarded Islam as a matter of private conviction and subscribed to it on her own terms. But there is no doubting that her faith was deeply held during her very long life. She lived for 30 years after her pilgrimage, dying in January 1963, one of the coldest months of the century in Britain. She was buried in arctic conditions but according to the precepts of Islam and, as she had stipulated, on a remote hillside on her Glencarron estate.
Her interment symbolized her two worlds: A piper, so frozen that he was hardly able to walk, let alone perform, played “MacCrimmon’s Lament,” and the equally refrigerated imam of the Woking Mosque in London declaimed in Arabic the surah “Light,” which she had found so moving in Makkah. A verse from the same surah adorns the flat slab on her grave, over which the deer undoubtedly wander, just as she had wished.
William Facey (william.facey@arabia.uk.com) has spent his career as a museum consultant, writer and publisher on the Arabian Peninsula. He worked and traveled widely there during the 1970’s and 1980’s, and since then his books have established him as a well-known author on the region. He is currently director of Arabian Publishing Ltd., London.
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