Going to a foreign land and encountering cultural differences are nothing new to me, but the differences I have encountered in Saudi Arabia are so great that sometimes it feels like I had landed on the Klingon home world.
Language
It was a surprise to me that the people in top management at the client company speak remarkably fluent English. Many were educated in the West. Business meetings are conducted entirely in English without any difficulty. This is remarkable considering how insular the country is otherwise and how different Arabic is. For one, it writes from right to left, except for numbers which are treated as a unit and written from left to right. The juxtaposition may seem awkward at first, but one probably doesn’t think much of it. Take the case of how you write fifty cents and fifty dollars in English – 50c but $50. The placement of the symbol changes but doesn’t seem to bother anyone much.
What is odd is that you’d think that the Arabs use Arabic numbers. The whole world uses Arabic numbers. But, no. The Arabs had to use Urdu numbers. One looks like a one. Two looks like a backward seven. Three is a two with an extra tilde. Four looks like an epsilon. Five looks like a zero. Six looks like a seven. Seven looks like a Roman five, i.e., v. Eight is seven upside down. Nine is a nine. Zeros is a dot. For instance, if you see something that looks like 70, it’s actually 65. After two weeks here, I have gotten a little used to these numbers. This is useful for telling the Saudi riyal bills apart, even though the Arabic numbers do appear on the back side. I haven’t learned how to say the numbers though, partly because I had very little opportunity to interact with non-English speaking Saudis.
Dress Code
The club scene in New York must have a very similar dress code as the Saudis. Dress in colors. Your choice of white or black. White for men; black for women. The top half of the white robe a Saudi man wears in fact looks remarkably similar to a shirt. The buttons stop at midriff. It then extends like a long skirt to the ankles. The style differences are mostly in the detail much like men’s shirts elsewhere. Most of the variations are in the styling of the collar, cuffs, buttons, etc. All Saudi’s are of course all Muslims, so they wear a white skull cap. The headdress is a piece of square cloth folded into a triangle, called ghotarah, either of white color or of a red checker pattern. The ghotarah is held down on the head by a black two-loop ring, called agal. The biggest creativity in how they dress seems to come from the shoes. There are simply no rules – anything from sandals, to Oxfords, to sneaker.
Wearing a dark colored suit and walking across the street to lunch, it became immediately obvious to me why the Saudis dress the way they dress. White is the best color under the desert sun. The flowing robe is probably comfortable and promotes air circulation. The head dress prevents a sunburn around the neck and is quite handy in a sand storm. Women dress in black, the worst color to wear in the sun. Makes perfect sense too. They shouldn’t be out there in the sun, should they?
All women, foreign or Saudi, are required to wear the infamous black abaya. Foreign women are not required to cover their faces. Western women do not cover their hair either. All Saudi women wear veils. Some show their eyes through a slit; others cover their entire face. There are some differences in how the head cover pieces are put together. There are also some minor variations in trimmings and the material of an abaya. It seems that abayas with flashier decorations are mostly sported by Western women. Without the head cover, they look like they are wearing a graduation gown. For them it’s probably a bad graduation day every day. Some of the women in the compound run a small cottage industry printing out fridge magnets that mimic a traffic sign with an abaya clad figure and the words "Black Moving Objects".
Again the biggest creativity observed in woman’s fashion, if there is such a thing, is in the shoes, as they are the only observable part of a woman in public. What the women wear underneath could only be deduced from what the clothing stores sell. I was in fact very surprised to find many stores selling Western styled woman’s clothes that look quite fashionable and even sexy on the manikins. They even sell cosmetics. Why would a woman buy such things if she’s always covered from head to ankle in black? Upon further reflection, I suddenly came upon a very good answer by asking the question, why do women buy designer lingerie?
The Invisible Sex
A woman’s place in Saudi society is the home. The birth rate among the Saudis is three to four times that of the developed countries. The average size of a household is six. Fully 60% of the Saudis are under the age of 20. I haven’t found out how many men actually have more than one wife. There are only two professions women can enter: teaching and nursing. The latter is probably filled by foreign women. I was in fact surprised to find woman stewardesses on my flight from Jeddah to Riyadh on Saudia. They wore sky blue robe uniforms with head dresses that cover the hair but show the faces. Later I realized that they were most certainly foreigners, to whom a lower "moral standard" applies.
At the airport waiting for my plane to Riyadh, I wondered how the identity of a woman could be checked without taking her veil off, for example, when boarding an airplane or crossing borders? I was told that they are not checked, since women are always required to be accompanied by men, a husband or a close relative, when traveling.
What about when they eat? Wouldn’t the women have to take off the veils? Well, some restaurants simply do not serve women. Those that do have a separate family section or a family entrance or a family window. When multiple families dine in the same area, partitions are put in to separate the tables.
Given all the heroic measures to keep the virtuous sex virtuous, it’s no surprise that I have encountered very few women in public, and when I do, I don’t get to see much – well, how about nothing – of them. I see them mostly in markets and shopping malls, always accompanied, never alone, moving about like apparitions in broad daylight. It’s funny that modesty is a rather relative concept. It’s not how much skin a woman shows, but how much she shows relative to the norm. A scandalous mini-skirt in the office still covers a lot more than the most generous one-piece on the beach. It’s also funny that things are often more fascinating when covered than when shown. In a place where women are shrouded under the ugliest of black as if they were outcasts, the little they show, perhaps the eyes or the hands or the shoes, makes me wonder what kind of people are underneath. I guess I’ll have to wonder a lot longer since I do not hold any hope of getting to know that part of Saudi society.
What kind of people would put women in such conditions? What an incredible burden the men put on themselves. The wives cannot work. They keep having large families. When the husbands get off work, they have to go home and drive their wives to the markets and the malls. I don’t understand and probably will never understand the tortured rationale behind the law that forbids women from driving. Some say that a whole million people in this country are simply drivers.
I wondered how with the English speaking Western educated elite the way of life has managed to remain unchanged. For one, they’ve done an admirable job at segregating the foreigners from the Saudis (c.f. Cordoba Prison). I saw a show called the Lost Civilizations on the Discovery channel. Some Beduoins are still practicing elements of the Hammurabi Code – the first written law of Babylon. Two men suspected of theft had to lick a big hot iron spoon, and the judge decided the guilt and innocence of the two men by examining their burned tongues. A lot of changes must have taken place since oil was discovered. It is said that the Gulf War had changed the Saudi psyche, but any such changes are probably too subtle to be perceptible to a passing outsider like me.
During a dinner at the restaurant in the compound, Mike, the partner in charge of the project said he had thought that all of us would object to working in a country like Saudi Arabia. Actually, none of us had a problem with it. To me, we are in Saudi Arabia for business. We are not here to change Saudi society. Even if we do, and perhaps we should, the better approach is not to isolate, but to engage. Doesn’t our presence alone bring a glimpse of the outside world? We are here to change the way they do business, but that’s because they asked for it. Could this perhaps also change the way they think and the way they live? Is this enough? Is there or isn’t there a set of principles and rights so fundamental as to be self-evident, so fundamental as to be universal, so fundamental as to be beyond moral relativism, so fundamental that we not only have the right but also the obligation to impose, for the lack of a better word, onto others?
Terrence
Riyadh
Monday, March 29, 1999