Life in Saudi Arabia

About a week ago, I wrote a rather negative story about life in Saudi Arabia - and I believed things to be so at the time. But over the last couple of days, the perennial curse of the ethnographer has hit me. I’ve started changing my mind about Saudi Arabia. The very same things that made my blood boil a week ago, have become a way to appreciate the better aspects of Saudi life.

As a Muslim country, naturally some of Saudi Arabia’s good and bad points relate to religion (especially as Islam isn’t seen as just a religion here, but a way of life). Combined with this, my major interactions with Saudis thus far has been at the Qur’an dawrah (revision) classes that I’ve been attending over the past month, so this is the area I‘ve seen Saudis up close in. Besides, this approach should clear up the meaning of some of my more impenetrable facebook statuses!

Lets take one of those right now:

“ "Rivalry in worldly increase distracteth you" (alhaakum attakaasur) - Ibn Abbas used to read that one ayah all night and weep.”

Reading that status again, it strikes me that, for someone who is not from a similar situated culture to me, most of that status will be absolute gibberish - and yet the status touches upon perhaps the most fascinating part of Arab life. Memorisation of books is an integral part of the classical style of Arab education, and as one of the most famous scholars of his time, Ibn Abbas had obviously memorised the Qur’an, as well as numerous other books, and was reciting the verse from memory.

Of course there are arguments against rote-learning in the fluid world of education theory - and by and large they are right. It is far better to understand how a large leaf increases the rate of photosynthesis, than memorising that fact. However, what people often don’t realise is that the role of memorisation in classical Arab education is not the end itself, but a means to an end - meaning that understanding is gained, and to an even deeper level than normal. The second part of my status shows this. The scholars of the time used to learn only ten sentences at a time, but they would then make them part of their life by acting and reflecting upon them - and we all know that kinaesthetic learning is the in-thing these days. This meant that not only did they understand what they learnt, but they could also recall it at an instant, making them true masters of their field.

Even the process of memorisation opens doors to an understanding not available to others. For those of you who have memorised things over the years, you know how much repetition, linking, and photographic learning is involved. This intense focus often throws up rather interesting implications of the text - implications that wouldn’t occur to someone who was just reading it once through. Hence the booming world of exegeses in the Middle East. To learn Arabic grammar, one must memorise al-ajroomiyah, a centuries-old poem, and then read and understand its exegesis. To learn the art of recitation, one must learn al-jizriyah, another poem, and read its exegesis. In fact, this rule is applicable universally. One must memorise the core text, then read its exegesis, then understand and apply it.

Then of course there are the associated benefits of the practise of memorisation per se. One’s memory is like a muscle - the more one uses it, the stronger it becomes. There are famous stories such as that of the child prodigy Shafi’i, who would hear something once and memorise it, or of Bukhari, who had memorised over 500,000 hadith narrations (an entire libraries worth). But even for normal people, the effects are staggering. Take me for example, I’m not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, and yet I can memorise an entire page in five to ten minutes. For others I have met, these effects are even more pronounced.

And yet…Saudi Arabia, nay the Middle East in general, is no longer renowned for its education. Gone are the days of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where Muslim, Christian and Jewish scholars would converge from all parts of the globe and exchange ideas. Gone are the likes of Averroes, Avicenna, and Ibn Khaldun.

And the reason for this decline is simple. The Arabs have lost their drive.

There are only two kinds of people in this world: shepherds or sheep. The shepherds are independent thinkers, willing to take risks, and who are leaders of men. Sheep do what sheep always do: follow. All of us fall into one of these two categories, and most of us into both. Unfortunately, most Saudis are sheep - but that’s not the problem. In a flock, there is only ever one shepherd, and lots of sheep. No, the problem with Saudi Arabia is that they don’t have the shepherds. Perhaps this is a corollary of being a monarchy, where independent thought on a political level is banned, or perhaps its because vision and imagination are looked down upon in this deeply conservative country.

But one thing has to be said in favour of the Saudis. They are the nicest sheep to be found anywhere. Their entire constitution is suited to that of a sheep. They are generally mild tempered, stoic to the extreme, uninterested in causing sedition and revolution, and affectionate. A few stories illustrate these characteristics clearly. A patient came to see my father, and after the results came through, was told that he was infertile. What was his response? “alhamdullillah!” he said. The literal translation of the phrase is “praise be to God”, but in use, it carries heavy connotations of thankfulness. My dad said afterwards that patients in most other countries tend to start crying, or get angry when told this kind of news, but that in Saudi Arabia he found that the feelings most displayed were that of forbearance and fortitude.

Then, when my brother went to get an egg roll during break at the Qur‘an dawrah, but found the bag empty, a ten year old boy standing nearby gave him his egg roll instead - the very last one. Then later that day, on the bus home, a boy of about fourteen gave up his seat to me, because I was older than him, then a younger boy gave up his seat to him. This great characteristic of preferring others over yourself, could arguably be linked back to Islam, but I think that would do a great injustice to the Arabs. I know for a fact that no Pakistani would ever relinquish his seat, his egg roll, or his fertility without a titanic struggle beforehand. Islam didn’t give the Arabs these good qualities, it merely refocused them into doing it for the hereafter.

Without wanting to be dragged into the murky waters of life after death, I have noticed that “death” isn’t a taboo subject here, as it is in Britain. For a few days I puzzled over this. Surely Saudis wanted to stay alive as much as any other race? But then it finally clicked. Whereas we in the West view the timeline of our existence as starting from our birth, and ending at our death, in the Middle East this timeline starts from the creation of our souls, and stretches into the after life. In other words, the Saudi/Arab/Muslim view of death is as merely a stepping stone on an infinitely long journey. This beautiful concept gets rid of the fear associated with death. In fact an Arabic saying for the deceased is “they have gone on ahead, and we will be joining them”.

And perhaps this desensitising of death is the very reason for the loss of drive in the Arabs. There are no ultimate deadlines in their view of  existence, and hence no urgency. But this not the real reason, as it didn’t stop the Arabs from the Middle Ages from making the biggest advances in science at their time. So what was the difference between the Arabs then and the Arabs now?

To understand that, one has to realise that life is all about being able to switch between the general and the specific. One has to have a big general aim, and then has to gradually narrow the focus down to the specifics which will make that general aim a reality. Without a general aim, the specifics are aimless, and without the specifics, the general is unattainable. The difference between the Arabs now, and the Arabs of centuries bygone, is that the Arabs now, are stuck in the specifics, without really understanding why they are devoting their energies to a particular end; whereas the Arabs of the Middle Ages had a vision in mind; they had a thirst for knowledge, both religious and otherwise, and they were learning it to benefit humanity. Take Shafi’i, the child prodigy mentioned earlier. Not only did he go on to found one of the four established schools of thought in Islam, but he was also an accomplished doctor, poet, archer, and author of over a hundred books - and he died at the age of only 56.

But having said all that, it is this very rough-and-ready character of Saudis, hinting at their Bedouin past, that brings with it all the good traits too. In the times of the second Caliph, Abu Bakr, the Bedouin armies started assembling in the capital of the Muslim Empire Madinah. The uncouthness, rudeness, and harshness of these Bedouins riled the citizens of Madinah immensely, and they complained to the Caliph about them. But Abu Bakr didn’t take any action against them. He told the people to be patient, for these Bedouins were the very ones that were going to defend them and the Empire.

The same is true today. The Saudis have many bad traits - but along with these bad traits come corresponding good traits. It takes a bit of time to get past all the dead wood, but once one does, then one realises that the humanity that is found inside all of us, burns as brightly in this desert kingdom as anywhere else.