Saudi Arabia - مع السلامة

One way of saying goodbye in Saudi Arabia is ma'a as salama or مع السلامة which means 'go with safety' according to Wiktionary, said by the person who is staying to the one who is leaving.  It looks like I'm the one who's staying and I'm afraid it's time to say goodbye to Saudi Arabia!  I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of Saudi Arabian culture, nor have I had time this month to really do it justice.  I've learned a lot more about Saudi Arabia than I had time to blog about. 

I've also kept an eye on the English language and Saudi-based Arab News website - well worth a visit, if you want to get an insight into life in the Kingdom.  The news has been full of Saudi Arabia's response to the flooding in Pakistan on one hand, contrasted with the very disturbing reports in the Twittersphere about the abuse of a Filipino maid by her Saudi employers.  I was also surprised to read a report in the Arabic language Al-Riyadh (الرياض‎) newspaper, about the moral degradation of Saudi society, because of all the (straight) couples kissing in public.  Just today the Pink News has published a story about a gay Saudi diplomat, who claims he will be killed if he is sent home.

Some of the other things I've learned about Saudi Arabia are:

- It's almost ten times the size of the UK, with half the population.

- Saudi Arabia isn't just about deserts, it also has lush coastal areas on the Red Sea and fertile mountain resorts such as Abha. 

- The Rub al Khali or 'the Empty Quarter' is one of the most hostile landscapes known to man.

- Less than 2% of Saudi Arabia's land is arable. 

- According to The Economist's 2008 Democracy Index Saudi Arabia is the seventh most authoratitative country in the world.  I think I was more surprised to find out that Uzbekistan, a country I've lived in, came fourth in that index!

- Saudi Arabia didn't abolish slavery until 1962.

- Riyadh means 'the Gardens'

- 12 million Brazilians are of Arab origin.

- Non-muslims are not allowed to visit the holy cities of Medina and Mecca.

- Jeddah is the most multi-cultural and 'open' city in Saudi Arabia.

- Houses in Jeddah's Al-Balad district are made from coral, from the Red Sea.

- The religious police are called matawwa.

- Saudi Arabia has one of the highest road death rates in the world.

- Asir, now a province in the south-west of Saudi Arabia, was an independent kingdom until 1922.  It contains Saudi Arabia's highest mountain, Jebel Sawdah, which is 2910 metres tall.

- Wild baboons live in Asir region.

- The Farasan Islands, which are in the Red Sea, could become a major draw for tourists, if Saudi Arabia ever relaxes its strict visa requirements.

- Saudi Arabia is one of the richest regions in the world for Rock Art, with over 2,000 sites. 

- Saudi Arabia has a UNESCO world heritage site at Mada'in Saleh.

- Matthew Shepard's parents (the young man who was brutally murdered in a homophobic attack in Wyoming in 1998) lived in Dhahran and worked for the major oil corporation Aramco.

- Education isn't compulsory in the Kingdom and an estimated 39% of Saudi children don't attend school.

- Women are not allowed to practise law in Saudi Arabia.

- During Soviet times a quota of 20 Muslims were allowed to travel to Saudi Arabia from the USSR every year to perform the Hajj. 

- Winston's Hiccup or Churchill's sneeze is an anecdotal explanation of the sharp corner in the border between Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

- Folk beliefs claim that Eve is buried in Jeddah (جدّة‎) and that the name of the city comes from the Arabic word for grand-mother, which is jaddah (جدة)

I'm a big fan of Arabian music, although I'm more familiar with Arabesque singers of Turkey, than Saudi singers.  Arabian music has to be the definition of exotic for most western Europeans and, as I've been researching this blog, I've been listening to some of Saudi's greatest singers.

I'm going to leave you with one of my favourites - Mohammed Abdu.  Abdu grew up in Saudi Arabia's smallest province, Jizan and was orphaned at a very early age.  He's now a Saudi institution, but I like this video because it shows him at a time when he was still very young and had all the energy and passion of someone following his dream. 

Image credits:

The award-winning image of the Empty Quarter was taken by flickruser IrenicRhonda aka Rhonda Surman who is originally from High Wycombe, but now lives in the Highlands of Scotland.  You can see more of Rhonda's photos at http://www.flickr.com/people/irenicrhonda/

The picture of the Kaaba in Mecca was taken by flickruser Ammar Abd Rabbo

The photo of the Mada'in Saleh UNESCO site was provided by flickuser Omar A.

Thanks to Rhonda, Ammar and Omar for sharing your images with us, using the Creative Commons License.

Saudi Arabia - A country for Old Men?

Try as I might to learn something about everyday life in Saudi Arabia, I find myself running into the pillars of Saudi society - Islam and the Saudi royal family.  In an attempt to understand the workings of the royal family, I've been doing some reading on Wikipedia and on the Internet, trying to get my head around the stranglehold that the House of Saud has on their country. 

My conclusion is that it all boils down to money.  The House of Saud is reputed to be the wealthiest family in the world, worth countless billions of dollars.  Not hard I guess, when your family consists of thousands of people, many of whom have incredible personal wealth.  I've just learned that the infamous Al-Yamamah contract saw $90 billion dollars worth of Saudi money spent on arms bought from the UK, starting in the Thatcher-era.  Any family that has that much money to throw around is going to be hard to oppose.  More to the point, I wonder what happened to all that revenue, we could be doing with it in recession-hit Britain.

The ties between the House of Saud and Britain (as well as the USA) are legendary.  Britain is partly responsible for the Saudis gaining control of Arabia, as opposed to their rivals the Al-Rashidi.  If things had happened differently, I might be blogging about Rashidi Arabia with its capital at Ha'il.  Unfortunately for the Rashidis they backed the wrong horse, a crumbling Ottoman Empire that disappeared as quickly as they did. 

Birth of a dynasty

The main reason the Saudis gained control of Arabia was due to the leadership of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the first ruler of the modern Saudi dynasty.  Abdul Aziz was brought up mostly in exile in Kuwait, the Saudis having been defeated and Riyadh taken over by the Rashidis.  With the help of the British and support of local tribes, Abdul Aziz managed to recapture Riyadh, then all of the eastern region, Nejd and ultimately the key western region of Hejaz, with the holy sites at Medina and Makka. 

The Saudi family are followers of Salafism, better known in the West as Wahhabism, an incredibly strict and (believe it or not) austere form of Islam.  One of the first things Abdul Aziz did when he conquered the Hejaz was to destroy some important Islamic shrines in Makka, related to the relatives of the prophet Muhammad, believing this sort of worship to be akin to idolatry.  At first Abdul Aziz ruled the Nejd and Hejaz separately, eventually uniting them to form Saudi Arabia in the mid-1920's, with the blessing of the British government, on the understanding that Saudi Arabia wouldn't interfere with the British protectorates in Kuwait and Iraq.

Succession to the Saudi throne

Abdul Aziz, quite unusually, adopted a form of succession which would pass from brother to brother, rather than from father to son, as is more usual (sisters and daughters don't even come into it).  As Abdul Aziz had about forty-five sons in total, this was pretty doable, but has left Saudi Arabia of 2010 with a King (Abdullah) who is 86 years old, a proposed successor (Crown Prince Sultan) who is a sprightly 82 and Abdul Aziz's youngest surviving son (Muqran) is 65 years old (three years older than Prince Charles).  This type of succession has certainly helped the House of Saud retain their reins of power however, even I can do the math, it's obvious there will have to be a change sometime in the coming years.  If Muqran outlives the rest of them, then I guess it will be up to him to appoint a successor.

The Story so far

To date five of Abdul Aziz's sons have occupied the Saudi throne.  They are:

Saud

Abdul Aziz's second son by his first wife, Princess Wadhha of the Bani Khalid tribe.  Saud's older brother and Abdul Aziz's first son, Turki, died in the terrible flu epidemic that swept the world in 1919.  His wife was pregnant at the time he died and later gave birth to Turki's first son who, by the old system of succession, could have become Abdul Aziz's successor.  The rule of succession was changed after Turki's death.

Saud wasn't incredibly popular with the conservative powers-that-be and was more known for his extravagant spending on palaces than his good deeds.  He also tried to change the rule of succession back again, so that one of his own sons could succeed him and power would remain within his immediate family.  He appointed his own sons to positions of power, overlooking the natural rights of his half-brothers and almost bringing Saudi Arabia to the point of civil war in the early 60's before Saud was forced into exile and his younger half-brother took over.

Faisal

was anti-communist and he banned trade unions in 1965.  During his reign Saudi Arabia was starting to feel the first positive effects of being in the oil business and Faisal's lasting legacy was his contribution to the 1973 oil crisis, tripling the price of oil almost overnight, Faisal was instrumental in the OPEC embargo against the West.  Events in other countries were starting to shake the foundations of Saudi society, eg. events in Libya, where Al-Gaddafi ousted the equally formidable Libyan royal family in 1969.  Faisal established incredibly close ties with Pakistan and the Pakistani city of Lyallpur was renamed Faisalabad in his honour. Faisal was assassinated in 1975 by one of his half-brother's sons, who was subsequently declared insane.

Khaled

doesn't seem to have left much of a legacy and had little interest in politics, preferring to act as a symbolic head of the country.  I'm wondering if he was seen as an easy target when Iranian dissidents occupied the Grand Mosque in Makka in 1979, claiming that the existence of the Saudi Royal family was un-Islamic and that they were unworthy custodians of the two holy mosques.  No wonder he died of a heart attack in 1982.

Fahd

ushered in a period of unprecedented spending, which is a stereotype many Westerners have of how a Saudi royal might behave.  Whether visiting ports in the French Riviera on his $100 million ship Abdul Aziz or flying to London on one of his many gambling trips in his $150 million Boeing 747 with an in-built fountain, he certainly made himself at home with the world's moneyed classes! Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, forcing him to delegate most of his responsibilities to the Crown Prince Abdullah, who would become his successor.

Abdullah

is the current King of Saudi Arabia and faces a country that has been shaken up by the activities of terrorist organisations such as Al-Queda and an economy that is desperate to diversify its industries, in preparation for a day when the oil runs out. 

As for dynastic succession, it's very easy for us in the West to sneer and pat ourselves on the back for being such clever democrats.  The reality, of course, is that we have our own political dynasties, who are much subtler about their strangehold on power.  Is it any coincidence that Mark Thatcher was rumoured to be involved in the Al-Yamamah contracts?  What about the Bush dynasty and their close connections with the House of Saud?  As far as I can tell, the Saudis have been welcomed with open arms by our ruling dynasties, eager to cash in on the fountains of wealth. 

Image credits:

The archive photo is by flickruser bedharak aka R Sameer, who is originally from Hyderabad, but now lives in London.  It shows four of Abdul Aziz's sons (and one of his grandsons) who formed a delegation to the United Nations in New York in 1947. 

The second photo is of Riyadh's Kingdom Tower, the tallest building in Saudi Arabia and a remarkable symbol of Saudi wealth.  It was taken by flickuser ~Firas who is from Qaseem in Saudi Arabia, but currently lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Thanks bedharak and Firas for sharing this wonderful image with us using the Creative Commons license. 

Saudi Arabia - Cradle of the Arab race

It's hard to study the history of Saudi Arabia without making reference to the historical context of the rest of the Middle East.  I picked Saudi as my first Middle Eastern country for a good reason - because this is where it all started.  By that I mean, Islam, the growth of an Arab identity and the influence of oil-rich nations on the global politics of the late twentieth century. 

In preparation for this learning journey, I watched Lawrence of Arabia, the 1960's epic starring Peter O'Toole and Egyptian-born Omar Sharif.  It covers an interesting period in the history of the Middle East, when the British were conspiring with Bedu tribes of Arabia, to overthrow the oppressive yoke of the Ottoman Empire and establish a united and, according to Lawrence, independent Arabia, with Britain's support.  A major historical theme of the movie is the fact that Lawrence helps unite disparate tribes from different parts of the Arabian peninsula.  The concept of a united Arab identity is, in many ways, an historical construct and the real picture is a lot more complex, with tribal and religious loyalties taking precedence over the idea of nation.

In the same way as Hinduism has long been associated with ethnicity in India, Islam too was very much the religion of the Arabian people.  The main difference is that, whilst Hinduism is still predominantly practised by people of Indian origin, such was the appeal of Islam that a mere 20% of Muslims now live in the Arab world, with approximately 203 million Muslims in Indonesia and half a billion Muslims in Pakistan/India/Bangladesh.  Although the holiest Islamic sites of Medina and Mecca are in Saudi Arabia, the centre of Islamic culture has shifted around since the time of Mohammed to cities like Damascus (under the Umayyad's) and Baghdad of the Abbasid.  Delhi, Cordoba, Cairo and Constantinople have all had their golden ages of Islam and even a city like Samarkand in Uzbekistan, where I spent two years, has played its part in the development of Islamic culture and sciences.

I find the history of the Middle East fascinating.  European involvement in Middle Eastern affairs goes back to the days of the spice trade.  The Portuguese occupying the island of Socotra (in Yemen), securing their safe passage to India.  The Dutch stealing Arabian coffee beans and introducing a craze to 17th century Europe.  It would seem as though Saudi Arabia has bobbed along through all of this, taking a sceptical interest in regional affairs, often divided between the politics of the Gulf states and Iran, on one side of the country, the influence of Egypt and Africa on the other.  The change came in the 1920's, when the royal Saudi family of Riyadh managed to gain control of most of the Arabian peninsula, uniting the various nomadic tribes in, what was to become, a definitive Saudi Kingdom. 

Both the US and Britain have actively supported the national integrity of Saudi Arabia.  Even more so, when oil was discovered in the late 1930's and American interests moved in to make a quick buck and get the Saudi oil wells open for business.  King Faisal was a key figure in the OPEC oil embargo in 1973.  The major oil-producing countries found that they could treble the price of oil overnight and that affluent Western nations would still pay the price.  The result was an unprecedented explosion of wealth in the Middle East, for the oil-rich nations, naturally, and even the labourers coming from poorer neighbouring countries, who could send their wages home and create mini economic booms there too. 

I'm not sure anyone could have guessed how quickly things would change in the Kingdom and Riyadh, a city of 150,000 people in the 1960's, now has a population of 5 million!  Saudis enjoy one of the highest living standards in the world, have become notorious for their immense wealth in a way that, more recently, the Russian oligarchs have caught the world's attention.  The ruling Saudi families can send their children to the world's most exclusive universities.  Obesity is a pressing issue for a country hooked on American fast food. 

Of course, there is a downside to all of this - the exploitation of immigrant labour, the repression of women and LGBT people, the emergence of shadowy fundamentalist groups and the uncompromising hold that the ruling Saudis have on the country's governance.  Who only knows what the future has in store for this highly-influential nation, I guess the oil will run out some day? 

Image credits:

The satellite image of the Arabian peninsula is from Wikimedia Commons from the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) Project.  The image is more than 5 years old and is, therefore, in the public domain.

The beautiful picture of King Fahd Road in Riyadh (one of the wealthiest addresses in the country) was shared with us on flickr.com by flickruser Ayman Aljammaz who is from Dhahran in Saudi Arabia.  Ayman is a very talented photographer and you can see more of his images at

http://aljammazphotography.com/photography/

Saudi Arabia - Assalom Aleykum

From Jaipur, we're heading west another 1808 miles or 2910 kilometres to Riyadh, capital of al-Mamlaka al-ʻArabiyya as-Suʻūdiyya, a.k.a the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  This one is going to be a real challenge for me, not only because it's a country I have never visited and can barely begin to comprehend, but also because it's so easy to fall into the stereotypes of Saudi Arabia, to get caught up in the excesses of an oppressive regime and a society that makes no sense to someone living in the liberal and 'decadent' West.  It's a challenge to myself, really - to go beyond the negative stereotypes, overcome my own prejudices, to learn about the everyday lives of Saudi Arabians and to learn about aspects of their culture, music and language that are, I'm sure, every bit as enthralling as the culture, music and language of Rajasthan.

When I think of Saudi Arabia, I think of oil, Islam and the scorching heat of the desert.  Adding Riyadh to my weather app today, I struggled to come to terms with the idea of the 45 degree heat in the Saudi capital.  I often think that national character can be influenced by your weather system - the languid, easy-going nature of Thai people, only occasionally getting hot under the collar - the stern and stubborn nature of the Russians, getting through six months of winter with curses and gritted teeth.  I'm guessing with scorching hot weather, the Saudis are a pretty tough bunch, surviving in a landscape that the rest of us would find intolerable.

Although I've not been to Saudi Arabia, I know several people who have.  Their stories have varied and the hospitality of their Saudi hosts seems to have only been dampened by the frustrating lack of alcohol, a staple of British and Irish culture.  As an ex-TEFLer, Saudi Arabia was always an option for me, with its high living standards, competitive salaries and low living costs.  But I decided against it in the end.  I like adventure, but Saudi Arabia was a little bit too adventurous, even for me!

In the next few weeks, I want to learn as much as I can about Saudi culture.  I want to learn about Islam and understand Arabian history.  I've already ordered a book by a Saudi author and one by a Westerner, with his insights into living in the region.  I want to watch 'Laurence of Arabia', listen to some Arabian music and cook a traditional Saudi dish.  I don't know if it'll be possible, but I want to find some Saudi friends on Twitter, as I have done with the other countries in my blog.  If nothing else, it will be an interesting journey and one that I hope you will join me on!

Image credits:

The image of the minarets was taken at dawn, in Medina, by flickruser Shabbir Siraj who is a Pakistani-Canadian photographer and film-maker and has shared this image with us using the Creative Commons License.  If you want to see more of his photos visit http://www.flickr.com/photos/shabbir/