Seven Years in the Magic Kingdom
In 1996 I decided I needed a “nest egg” if I was ever to retire with dignity. This objective brought me to the deserts of Saudi Arabia. I was not wholly ignorant of what I was getting into for I had read everything my local university library held on the country, which admittedly was not much. But, as they often say, nothing could have prepared me for what I would experience in the Gulf over the next seven years.
I flew from Canada to London, then on to Dubai where I had to spend the night. The next day, an hour after breakfast, I was on another flight to Saudi Arabia when an announcement came over the PA system. It was the Captain telling us that we were entering a time zone a half an hour behind Dubai. Well, as I was to find out, the time difference between Saudi Arabia and the modern world is more than a half an hour. It is more like several hundred years. The importance of this is what I learned during my time in what expatriates ironically call the Magic Kingdom.
Coming from Europe into the old airline terminal in Al Khobar was literally going from the First into the Third World. The building had a low ceiling that produced an air of suffocation. The floor was packed with men from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, the Philippines, all workers who had little choice but to leave their families to come to labor in Saudi Arabia. I considered myself better off than they were for I had been hired by a contracting company to teach in a training center of a large, Saudi-owned oil corporation.
There were several Westerners that got off the plane with me who, unbeknown to me at the time, would be my colleagues. I watched one of them, an awkward 30-year old fellow with short, blonde hair, tip a Nepali porter a hundred Riyals — around thirty US Dollars — for carrying his bag a mere ten steps to our waiting minibus. Like the rest of us, I could see that the fellow was disoriented and nervous. I will call this man Phil.
Mad Hatter Colleagues
Along with Phil, several of us new contractors were moved into a ten-storey concrete block that was being rented by our contracting Company. The Company was eager to please us because we were the first of dozens of new recruits hired to teach various subjects at client companies in the Eastern Provinces. Fortunately for me, Phil was not assigned to be my flat mate but was paired with a man named Tommy, a devout Lutheran from the Southern USA.
Phil turned out to be a pack rat that got onto Tommy’s nerves almost immediately. Eventually, the two of them agreed to divide their apartment in two, sharing only the kitchen. But this worked only for a brief time until Tommy decided he couldn’t stand Phil’s messy ways any longer and moved out. Over the next six years Tommy would move again and again until he went into a psycho-crisis the likes of which I witnessed in several men over the years. But, more of this later.
Some time later, Phil also left our apartment block to settle in not one but in two apartments, one of which the contracting company was obliged to supply, the other which he rented. He did this because he had accumulated so much junk that he needed a second place just to store it all. At one point, Phil owned two old clunky cars, both of which he filled with books, papers, metal boxes, stuff of all kinds that he was reluctant to throw away. It occurred to me that this was his way of coping with the alien Saudi culture. He was physically “insulating” himself against it with stuff, creating a kind of nest against what soon became an increasingly hostile desert-world.
There were other contractors equally interesting. Mick and Fred were middle-aged roomies. Both were alike to a great degree. When I went to visit them in their two-bedroom flat, I found Mick in pajamas at mid-afternoon, lying in a reclining upholstered chair he had bought for his vast bulk, a glass of potent home-brew in hand. Mick had a high-pitched, whiney voice and a mischievous smile, like an evil character out of a Batman movie. At first I thought he was having me on; he couldn’t really be like this. But what I saw was what he was.
Mick became a bit of a problem in the building for he knew where to get alcohol, some deadly stuff called sedique, which translates as little friend. This was homebrewed whisky that once left me with a throbbing headache for days. Mick had another vice: he invited Arab boys literally off the street to help him drink the stuff. This got to be a dangerous activity when Mick brought home the seventeen-year old son of a highly-placed local police official.
When we found this out, many of us stopped joining Mick on the roof of our building to imbibe sedique and chew the fat. We expected to be raided at any time because the possession of alcohol, and especially feeding it to Saudis, was punishable by imprisonment or worse. Fortunately for us, perhaps, Mick was fired within six months for giving all of his trainees A’s on a final Chemistry exam. It turned out that when he had applied for the job, he had altered his credentials to include Chemistry as a subject he was able to teach, when he had no useful knowledge of it at all.
During those first six months, Fred and I once went to Bahrain by bus, over the long causeway that links the island kingdom to Saudi Arabia. We ended up in a smoky nightclub where the attraction was a dozen dancing girls from Eastern European countries. Fred paid a lot of attention to one particular lady, buying her garlands of cheap-looking paper flowers that he placed around her neck in exchange for pathetic little dance movements. (In case anyone wonders, none of these women were chosen for their dancing abilities.)
While Fred was totally entranced by this woman, dozens of drunken Saudis from across the causeway were being as foolish as we, gawking at female flesh which, in a European or American context, would have been a quite harmless activity. But here, where Muslim women covered themselves from head to toe, only infidel women were hired to make such displays of themselves. Still, I doubt Fred felt as foolish as I did. He managed to get the woman’s telephone number and thereafter called her many times long-distance from Saudi Arabia. At one point he seemed to be in love, telling me: “I’ve never had such a beautiful girl interested in me. Never.” The infatuation came to a sudden end when the woman’s contract was finished; she went home to wherever she came from, without Fred.
I had a roomie, or several over the first three years. The first one, Arthur, was a tall, thin, balding fellow. He had a family in the States, all kids grown up, and he was divorced. The problem with Arthur, as with most of the men I met in Saudi, was that he did not communicate. I never learned much about him. He would come home, say Hi as he walked past me, and disappear into his room. There he would stay until the next morning. Sometimes, though, Arthur would go out in the evening, and come home quietly the next day. It was a mystery where he went, but one time I was up early, puttering around the kitchen making my breakfast, when I saw a figure in white sail past the door. Someone was going to the washroom. When the figure returned, I noted it was a young Saudi man dressed in the white thobe they traditionally wear. It seems he had been communing with Arthur all night. After a few months, Arthur was transferred to Jeddah; he just disappeared as so many of my colleagues eventually did.
My next roommate was a strange man in his thirties with a caustic wit that got everyone crying with laughter. He did not appreciate Arabs, although he had a lengthy history with them for he had spent years in Egypt teaching English. John was a capable teacher, knew his stuff, but he was manic-depressive and often just locked himself in his room, even on weekends. Once I asked him to come downtown for a meal, but his reply was a definite: “I didn’t come here to spend money.” Like many men and women expats in Saudi, John was a cheapskate. He counted his coins in his room, or looked through the newspapers for discount coupons on groceries. He dressed in old jeans and always looked sloppy, as though he needed a mother to look after him. But, he was a card.
John finally came to a crisis when he went head to head with the Principal of the training center where we both worked. Not taking John seriously, his class had been unruly, so he sought help from the Principal, an American who was new to the job. The Arab rowdies would listen only to one of their own because we foreigners were considered too “soft” to be taken in earnest. But the Principal was reluctant to go into John’s classroom. With Arabs it was the heavy stick or bedlam would prevail. The long and the short of it was that the Principal accused John of not being in charge of his own class, at which point John lost his temper and quit. Thirty days later, he was back in New York, unemployed.
But, there were other memorable characters. In his homeland, Ralf had trouble keeping jobs. He was a college instructor with a Master’s degree in Science, and was capable in his subject from what I could tell but, like many of us, he was a difficult personality. Ralf had never been out of Northern Ontario (“Not even to Quebec!”). But as destiny would have it, he ended up in one of the worst countries for a Westerner.
As soon as he arrived in Saudi, Ralf set to making alcohol, despite the risks. This was not a matter of macho bravery, but of desperation. Not able to find hash or marijuana to sedate his confused mind, he made a high-grade intoxicant from fruit juices and yeast, bought in the local supermarkets. He sold the resulting brew, but mainly he drank the stuff himself. Once, when I visited him in his “villa”, in a kitschy, so-called “luxury” compound, he was busy moving large bottles of drink into a closet in case the police dropped in. I never tasted Ralf’s stuff because my previous experience with sedique hadn’t been such a good one, but I understand from others that Ralf the Scientist was a superior brewer.
Ralf was scruffy-looking, with an unruly beard and longish hair protruding from under a battered up cowboy hat. The Company must really have needed him as they seldom hired people who looked like they had just come out of the backwoods. He wore flannel shirts over a tee-shirt despite the heat, and talked a mile a minute, mainly about himself. He was a self-promoter who, I believe, knew that he was way out of his cultural element. He kept saying things like “What am I doing here? I’m a country boy out of Northern Ontario. I haven’t ever been out of the North. I haven’t even seen Canada.”
Well, like some of his predecessors, Ralf found his level of tolerance. One day he was in his car driving on one of the desert highways when (he claimed) he saw a cruise missile streaking just over his head, following the road. Then, he said, it suddenly veered East to disappear over the Arabian Gulf. He freaked out. In his imagination, this was a missile from Iran sent across the Gulf to test the American air defenses in Arabia. This part of the world was just too dangerous for a family man from the Great White North, so Ralf resigned and went back to Canada.
Private homes walled in (not my photo)
Stress of Expat Life
Stress took its toll on many people that I met, but they handled it differently. The most common defense was to hibernate, to stay indoors watching TV or reading detective novels. Some drank to excess; a few managed to get marijuana and get stoned. (Despite it being punishable by death, I haven’t heard of any Westerner being executed for peddling drugs in Saudi Arabia. Those caught are normally deported.)
Still on the subject of stress, one memorable American colleague snapped following Al Quaida’s killing some nineteen American servicemen in Al Khobar. Eddy told me that after the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996, his Saudi trainees at our center had joked about the atrocity. Blind with rage, Eddy went berserk. He got one trainee in a headlock and attempted to ram him through a glass-plated door. Weeks later, he threw a football at another and knocked him off his feet. In class, Eddy shouted obscenities like “I had your sister last night and she was good!” All of this got him fired, of course. But, typically, Crazy Eddy, as he became known, managed successfully to plead for clemency. Our new Lebanese principal kindly allowed him to stay on to the end of his contract before Eddy was surplussed.
There was another example of a nervous breakdown. A teacher named Richard was known to be manic depressive. He took prescribed pills to level out his mood swings. However, under pressure during the second Gulf War, and stressed by marital problems, Richard was increasingly vulnerable. When a group of noisy trainees entered the center’s library where he was trying to work, he lost it. Richard hurled verbal abuse at them. In a rage, he went around the library punching filing cabinets, kicking trash cans, and driving the trainees out of the place. Complaints were made against him immediately. Days later, he apologized to the Principal and the trainees involved, but his reputation had been shattered. He became more and more withdrawn, until he eventually resigned and returned to the United States.
A third example of a nervous breakdown is that of a teacher I’ll call Rocco. This was a highly-educated, manic depressive man, possibly a ‘schizophrenic’ who should never have been in Saudi Arabia. Rocco took offense easily and came to believe people were conspiring against him. He once threatened to punch me out on the back steps of our office building for some perceived slight. When he verbally abused two other colleagues, he gained a reputation as a serious threat. One day, while driving to work, I noted a white man madly trying to pull a Saudi man out of a car stopped by the side of the highway. It was Rocco tugging at a terrified driver. Rocco was kept on just long enough to reach his first twelve months with the Company, and then he was also sacked.
Another notable character was the sports coach, a thick-accented, burly Texan in his sixties. It was difficult to see why he was still plugging away when he had a charming wife waiting for him back home, but apparently Coach Green could not stop working. Some called him “Windbag”, because he would not shut up. At any staff meeting, when it came to questions, the Coach would have lots to say. He was a great self-promoter whose statements usually began with something like “Recently I did this and this. I made this and that improvement. I got this for the gym. I met with the Higher Ups and got this for us. I happen to know that…” He always implied he had wasta (connections); he supposedly knew the managers that mattered and was listened to. But the teachers believed none of it.
Everything in the Coach’s universe revolved around his sports program. Of all the egotists I met in Saudi Arabia, the Coach ranks as Number One. When Westerners were beginning to be accosted in the streets of Khobar after the second Gulf War began, the Coach carried a two-by-two length of wood so that he looked like Moses with a staff. “Ahl whack em one if they come at me,” he used to say with dead earnestness.
But, there was also an endearingly soft side to the Coach. I noted he was often lenient with some of the physically weaker boys, encouraging them to do their “personal best” without having to compete with the athletic ones. At one point he lost a big wad of money through his own carelessness, but he blessed whoever had found and kept it saying: “Ah hope the one who found it really needed it, that’s all ah can say.”
Back to Tommy. After he and Phil split up, Tommy moved into one compound after another, never feeling safe. By this time the intifada, the uprising in Palestine, had commenced and Tommy came to feel increasingly under threat. Inside Saudi, there were now bombings of foreign nationals. Some expats were arrested on false charges in an attempt to make the bombings look like the work of foreigners. Some people were severely wounded. My own doctor, a chiropractor from the States, lost an eye and an arm when a package delivered to him at work exploded. An American instructor at a Saudi Navy college was shot four times while in his office. The teacher was in a coma for weeks before he died. Several car bombs went off in the Khobar. These the Saudi government blamed on expat “alcohol mafia” turf wars, a fiction none of us believed. Many expats now took to looking under their automobiles for explosives before going to work. Others never left their compounds except to go shopping. No one felt safe. Consequently, our relations with the Saudis deteriorated rapidly.
Palestinian Uprising
The intifada marked the turning point of our relations with the Arabs. Once the Jews and Palestinians resumed their deadly dance of death, the Gulf Arabs became further politicized against all those with white faces that they assumed were in support of Israel. We foreign teachers received a fax which some dimwit actually photocopied and put into all or our mailboxes at work. In objectionable grammar and misspellings, it said we would all be killed unless we got our governments to stop their support of Israel. This did a lot to boost teacher morale.
Violence Forever
On the city streets, too, attitudes changed. To begin with, the Saudi Arabs in the local shops had never been too friendly. In fact, they normally ignored us, seldom said hello or gave any sign of acknowledgement of our existence. Expats seemed to be persona non grata, a necessary evil. But now we had Saudi youngsters calling out to us “Fuck You, Fuck You” as though they were New York cabbies.
Some Western women were spat upon in the local shopping mall. One of our teachers was knifed while in a gold souq downtown. My own experience of hostility inside Saudi was limited to a ten-year old boy on the Cornice hurling verbal abuse at me. He had been sent by his father — a tactic that doesn’t say much for parenting.
Our relations with our fellow teachers from Arab countries changed as well. Before things deteriorated, we used to joke around quite a bit. But once the intifada became a daily thing on TV, with Al Jazeera showing bloodied Arab children, or Israeli soldiers humiliating old men and women, our Arab colleagues became more and more taciturn. All of us felt the walls of resentment rise between us. And no matter that we had lunch together on occasion, we Westerners were less and less often invited to break bread with Arabs in the lunch room. This uncomfortable atmosphere took a turn for the extreme as soon as September 11 hit. But, we’ll get to that in a moment.
We all had schizoid attitudes towards the Arabs. We liked them as individuals. It was hard not to for Arabs are personable, fine-feeling people. Saudis, however, tend to be different. Few of them invited foreigners home; fewer still became friends with infidels. There is considerable group pressure on Saudis to remain aloof even from fellow Sunnis. In the Saudi conception of things, they are the center of the umrah, and they are the people chosen by Allah eventually to rule the world. They may deny this, but respect for other ways of life is far from within their ultra-conservative worldview. Cultural relativism, acknowledgement of so-called “co-religions”, is out of the question despite what they say about Islam’s acceptance of Jesus and Moses as prophets.
Born to Rule
Mentalities Clash
From my experience, I can say that the conservative Muslim mentality is as remote from that of the modern person as is the dark from the light side of the moon. So, despite the glitzy glass and steel buildings, the Safeway supermarkets, and the Mercedes Benzes cruising along the highways of Arabia, the programs running in the heads of many Saudis are far from the tracks running in ours. And one should not be fooled by the occasional liberal, Western-educated Saudi. He is an anomaly, far from the rank and file of his medieval culture which is having a difficult time coming to grips with the contemporary world. In my seven years in Saudi Arabia, I met several well-trained, talented Saudi Arabs who would do very well in a tolerant environment like the United States. But in Arabia these people are a tiny minority that can be crushed by extremists at any time.
We were always aware of this East-West chasm in mentalities because we found it in our classrooms. Let me give some examples. Some of our trainees came from remote mountain tribes in the South West and the far North, quite distant from Dhahran and its population that was more used to foreigners. I had one worried fellow tell me that one of his friends had come back from the USA “bewitched by the Jews.” This meant that the friend no longer fit into the tribe; he had been changed by going abroad. Another student told me that the Americans had not really landed on the moon. He knew this because images of the US flag on what was supposedly the lunar surface had moved as in a gust of wind, and everyone knew there was no wind up there.
When I asked if he had ever looked at the moon through a telescope or had looked up to see the International Space Station then being assembled, he said No. Similarly, none of my trainees had ever looked through a microscope. Some trainees still would not believe the world was round. When one day I told my class there would be an eclipse of the sun the next day, many looked at me in disbelief. No one ever asked how I knew. Very few asked any questions at all.
Before the eclipse, schools in Saudi were closed and trainees were sent home. The mosques were full as the nation prayed for Allah not to extinguish the world. I was later told that even in the sophisticated, high-tech control centers of the Company, the Believers were on their knees during the black out, soliciting Allah for mercy. Just how much of this piety was for mutual display and how much was motivated by true belief is impossible to tell. There are no surveys done to ascertain degrees of religious belief in Saudi Arabia. To disbelieve is a form of heresy, a crime punishable by death.
Once I asked the class how they could deny the world was millions of years old when dinosaur bones were being found all over its surface. Their answer was typical, and it came straight from the mosque: Allah put dinosaur bones into the Earth to test our faith. End of discussion. Many trainees displayed no intellectual curiosity even in the subject of science, although they could readily memorize facts which they would never believe in. In their brains, if it didn’t come from a sheik or an imam, it had no validity. This mental vacuity disturbed me the most.
In the classroom, we had common instances of trainees who insisted on leaving the room when we showed educational videos. This was because they had been told that music and films were diabolical. Not uncommonly, some of our trainees used their pens to dig out the faces of women depicted in our textbooks. Others defaced pictures of churches, Christian crosses, statues of Buddha, and images of dogs. At times, entire pages were torn out of texts. I found instances of this even in the reference section of a university library near our center. Foreign texts were routinely defaced in acts of religious zealotry.
Enforced Ignorance
Censorship was everywhere. At our training center, magazines like Time and News Week were censored by our librarians so that all ads for alcohol were pasted over; all nudity, of course, including statues by Da Vinci and other artists of the Renaissance, was covered up. In local shops, the faces of women on packaging were covered by price stickers. Some books that we teachers had ordered for the center were withheld because they had the word “evolution” in their titles. This included books on topics like the “evolution of thought” published by Oxford University Press. Other books were banned because they dealt with Arab history written by Western rather than by Arab scholars. At one meeting of the library’s censor committee, I was told such books would be buried.
Censorship in mall (not my photo)
This doesn’t mean we had no books in the center’s library. We actually managed to accumulate a decent collection, considering the circumstances. However, only we teachers ever made use of it. The majority of our trainees were neither capable nor interested in reading the library’s holdings of scientific, cultural, and historic material. The only videos they watched voluntarily were those of Mr. Bean. Most of our magazine subscriptions were eventually cancelled, probably because they tended to be from the United States.
No Piglets Wanted
Mass Brainwashing
The pervasiveness of ideological control is noticeable on every block of every city in Saudi Arabia. According to the Quoran, men can pray in a clean place at home, but in Saudi they are pressured to go to the local mosques. For convenience, there is one on every block. There are mosques on the beaches, in schools, in military and police compounds, in airports, at border crossings, at gas stations, in shopping malls, in corporations, in government buildings, and there are temporary mosques in urban residential areas under construction. When the call to prayer is heard, shopping malls shut down; stores, banks, businesses, and gas stations close. It is not uncommon to see truck drivers leave their vehicles at the side of the highway at the scheduled time for prayers.
Religious indoctrination and group-control is all pervasive. If people are not watched by religious enforcers, the mutawa, they are watched by the nation’s secret police. Group cohesion and conformity are central to the lives of Saudis. In this, the nation’s leadership has been more successful than the National Socialists ever were. But, such demand for conformity has squashed personal initiative, creativity, self-expression, joyfulness, and any sense that the individual even matters.
The Center of the Saudi Mind
By way of illustration, we had a talented young man at the center who wanted to start his own magazine. The more he sought advice and support from his fellow Saudis, the more discouraged he became. He was told it would never succeed, that it went against tradition, that it might be offensive, and so on. Little wonder that he gave up. Multiply his experience by a million times and you have the prevailing mood amongst young people in Saudi Arabia. Many are defeated before they even get started in life.
Photography Verboten
When I first arrived in Saudi, I looked forward to doing a little photography. Everything was new and interesting, yet I soon found out that to photograph people and places in the public sphere can be hazardous. I first understood this when colleagues and I drove to a Shiite town known for its Friday morning market. Once there, I got out my camera and began to quietly take a few shots. Some traders from outside of Saudi Arabia actually hammed it up for me, demanding to have their pictures taken. This was encouraging. Yet, when we headed back to our vehicle, stones came flying our way. I didn’t see who was throwing them, but the message wasn’t lost on me.
On the same theme, at a dinner to which female teachers from the Company’s training center for women were invited for the first time, someone took a flash snapshot of our female colleagues. The women were fully veiled. Still, the result was a spine-chilling scream from one of the females. A Company manager immediately tore the film out of the man’s camera and destroyed it in the light. The result was that our female colleagues were not invited to subsequent Company dinners. Mixing of the genders clearly held many terrors.
Saudi Arabia is still coming to terms with media like film, TV, and photography. It helps to remember that King Faisal, who introduced television and radio into the kingdom, ended up assassinated. Still, you find large photographs of the reigning monarch and his two brothers posted at public intersections. No one dares touch these — at least not yet. There are also some tentative attempts at advertising on billboards. When there are human faces depicted, however, they are either fuzzed over or otherwise “defaced” so that they are not “fully” human. This seems to meet the Wahhabi demand for iconoclasm.
Propaganda and 9/11
Over the years, there was a noticeable increase in propaganda. This took the form of leaflets deposited in expat mailboxes. These writings explained the “True Faith” to us infidels. It also took the form of vitriolic hyperbole in the Arab News, our main source of the Saudi perspective on current events. Here too, the letters to the editor tended to be either from hand-wringing Americans who viciously dumped abuse on their own country, or from inflamed Muslims who denounced the “US-Zionist conspiracy” against Islam. Occasionally there was an Arab voice that pleaded for reason to prevail and an end to name-calling. But this was rare. In all the Arab media, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the second Gulf War were portrayed as American conspiracies to dominate the oil-producing states and eradicate Islam. Whichever way you turned in Saudi Arabia, you found anti-American hostility.
Declaration of War
Now to 9/11. I had just turned on the TV at home when I noted CNN was showing one of the World Trade Center towers burning. I asked myself how someone had managed to convince CNN to participate in what I thought was a made-for-TV movie. I had this impression because the reporter commenting on the scene was wholly emotionless, professional as we call it. But then I realized what I was seeing was for real. It hit me like a stone in the face as I understood this was a declaration of war.
Three days after the event, the word came down from senior management of our Company that Muslim employees could offer us expats condolences for those killed in New York. This took the ludicrous form of some of our Muslim colleagues coming up to us saying “I’m sorry for what happened.” But there was no sincerity in their voices.
Even more absurd, some months later, in an introductory speech at a dinner, a Company executive referred to 9/11 as “the accident”, as though two planes had veered off course and collided with the World Trade Center.
In class, our trainees often cited the popular rumor that the CIA was behind the attack on America, that Jews knew about it beforehand and did not show up for work that day. One student suggested the atrocity was carried out by the Red Army Faction. Anyone but Muslims was to blame. This too was (and remains) a common attitude in the Arab world.
In the Arab News, headlines denounced the US government for accusing the Saudis of inaction against Al Quaida. In an angry tone, the King equated criticism of Saudi Arabia with hostility against all of Islam. Denials of responsibility were printed daily in all of the kingdom’s English-language papers. This was typical of the Saudi response: angrily deny, shift the blame, ward off embarrassment, and bury your head in the sand. This has continued until recently. What has remained throughout the Muslim world, though, is the Anger, anger, anger.
I have thought about this for some time and have concluded that a lot of the rage comes from a sense of impotence. The modern world is leaving the remnants of Islamic civilization behind, bewildered in a swirl of technology, unacceptable ideas like human cloning, open sexuality, freedom for women, human rights, democracy — globalization for short. Saudis want in, not out of the modern world, but strictly on their conservative terms. This presents a contradiction that only heightens the sense of frustration.
Reactions to 9/11
Some people — and this included some of our Arab-American colleagues — took obvious delight in the destruction of 9/11. This is not surprising considering that ever since the name bin Laden had become common currency in the news some years before, Arabs have been in love with the guy. That is, on 9/11 they were caught up in the euphoria of what they saw as an Arab uprising against the United States and Israel. As leaders of the Islamic revival, Saudis saw themselves striking the opening blow against Western world dominance. After all, they had been schooled by imams to think in terms of Muslims versus Christians and Jews, a historic contest for world domination. On 9/11 the latest battle began, and their Saudi “brothers” were in the forefront. Since then we know that hundreds if not thousands of young Saudi men have gone to Iraq to kill Americans. They are receiving urban guerrilla training and arms with which, one day, they will return to Saudi Arabia to bring down the royal House.
My colleagues reacted to the events in New York and Washington in predictable ways. All of them were worried, and it showed. One of them, a jovial sort normally given to long-winded speeches, looked like he had not slept in days. Another, a short fellow with the New Yorker’s loud mouth, analyzed the situation day by day, creating more worry in the department. “They’re going to bomb the Camp, sooner or later. You know, if I were closer to retirement, I’d be packing now.” But Tommy actually made a break for it. He went on vacation and never came back.
Another one of us, who had been working for the Company for two decades, and who had made a small fortune in the process, finally declared he had woken up to reality as a result of 9/11. For years he had been going to the Company gym where he worked out with some Arab friends. After September 11, one of these friends had euphorically stated to him: “We got you! We got you!” referring to the smoldering Twin Towers. This attitude gives credence to a report that circulated right after the event. It came from a sympathetic taxi driver who said that on the evening of 9/11 he was busy ferrying Saudi men from party to party. Arabia was in a festive mood.
Contradictions Galore
Still, my trainees, without exception, wanted to study in the USA until Saudi involvement in the attacks became more and more difficult to sweep under the carpet. Then they worried about their own safety in the United States. Many of them were used to the idea they had special privileges in America; that the golden door would be open to them indefinitely. I read one letter from a Saudi to the Editor of the Arab News that decried being denied a US visa to go to a hospital there. A student told me that there was a special lane for traffic across the Peace Bridge at Niagara Falls reserved just for Saudis going into Canada. Arabs had come to consider admission to North America as a birthright. Until 9/11 Saudis needed no visas to enter the United States or Canada. Of course, since then, this has changed.
While all of my Muslim colleagues were in the anti-American camp, a couple of our trainees made it known to me that they were not. Even before 9/11 one young fellow told me that he (and his father) saw Arab backwardness as the product of Islam. This was heresy. I just nodded my head but said nothing lest it got around. People were fired for less.
Another student once told me he saw his fellow trainees as a bunch of sheep, all running off to the mosque five times a day. He had grown up in the States and longed to return. He hated the life in Saudi, but his father worked for the Company and had little choice where he was posted. Several other trainees who had lived in America hated being in Arabia; it was not their homeland. Some trainees had been born in the USA, deliberately so, in order that they would be able to claim US citizenship. I recall reading in the papers that some 75 thousand Saudi families had houses in the United States. Yet I would not be surprised if most of these never voiced sentiments sympathetic to America or its people. Saudis were simply intimidated or empty-headed, waiting to be told what to think and say.
Life in the Expat Ghetto
As I did not live on the compound owned by the oil Company, I did not see camp life day by day. But, occasionally I house sat for a Western couple who were long-time residents. During those times, I noted how empty the compound streets were, even during the cool winter months, and how the Arab residents kept their distance from the foreigners. You didn’t see much interaction between foreigners and Saudis anywhere. Every individual or family had their own prefabricated home, all the same sandy color, all with high walls around little backyards to ensure privacy – or segregation. The gardens were tended by little brown men in uniforms, employed by contracting companies. They watered the lawns, swept the sidewalks of dog shit, and did home repairs. To me, it all seemed like a surreal system of apartheid.
Life with a wall around it
For leisure, the occupants of the compound had much more choice than those of us contractors who lived in town. For instance, there was a horse farm where the members could go riding. There were a couple of pools, billiard halls, and weight rooms, a cinema, and a bowling alley. There was a coffee shop where the Saudis came to ogle the Western girls. There was also an American supermarket, a large dining hall, two big mosques, a library, and some recreational clubs that only camp members could join. Contractors were excluded from all of these, although some managed to sneak into the place occasionally by taking advantage of lapses in security, of which there were many.
While in Saudi Arabia many expats felt the need to congregate in clandestine churches. This was done on Fridays, the Muslim equivalent of Sunday. There were no church buildings as such permitted in Arabia, but the compound had three or four places where congregations could meet. Services were presided over by priests or ministers who were hired by the Company, and rituals followed much the same line as they do anywhere in America. However, Christmas and Easter were not openly acknowledged. Christmas Day was a normal working day, as was Easter. Christmas lights were forbidden year after year, but people put strings of white lights on their houses anyway. You can’t keep Christians down.
Everyone on the camp seemed to be getting it on with everyone else, sort of like lascivious fish in a tank. But there was a pecking order. The top earners, doctors, managers, and engineers, were the elite. They had the biggest homes, the most expensive cars, and the loudest mouths at any party. They also attracted the nurses. It was not infrequent to learn that a Western engineer, just before going back to his country of origin, would confess to his girlfriend that he had a wife and children waiting for him at home.
Sometimes this happened after years of what the woman thought was a genuine relationship. I know of one woman who was led to the altar twice only to find her intended was already married. She was devastated. One unfortunate nurse committed suicide after leaning about her male friend’s duplicity. The fact that so much sexual activity was normal on the camp only reinforced the impression amongst Arabs that Westerners were in a state of moral degeneracy. We were on the decline.
Amongst the men I got to know, there were similarly pathetic cases. One of these, a man in his late fifties, was told by his wife back in the USA not to bother coming home. She didn’t want him any more. Another fellow discovered his Latin American wife of many years was living with a much younger man. This came after years of sending money to her from the Middle East. Yet another man found himself locked out of his own flat when he went home on a scheduled visit. His wife, who had taken up with her music instructor, later sent him divorce papers. This is all to say that at times those who go off alone to remote places in the pursuit of money risk losing more than they gain.
Unrealistic Expectations
In addition to such personal pressures, there were frustrations at work as well. When improvements in working conditions were ordered, the staff was seldom consulted. At times, sophisticated equipment was installed in our center that was never used. This included an expensive broadcasting studio through which we were supposed to link minds with colleagues and students in the States. The problem was we had nothing to talk about. Proposals for using the two-way, live tele-link were solicited by management, but nothing was ever undertaken. This was some manager’s bright idea of a contribution to the training department, but it never got off the ground. The Company invested heavily in the training center in the hope that we would produce exceptional intellects that would be able to go to schools like Harvard and Yale. Such fantasies prevailed.
However, our trainees sent to the States did not do as well as the Company expected. As a consequence, courses were constantly added and dropped. Cooperative learning was introduced (and then quietly abandoned) in the hope this would be the magic bullet to success. We added all manner of college entrance-test preparation that took hours from valuable class time. We added physical education to the curriculum and had sports competitions, swim lessons, all to the good, but none of these brought higher Grade Point Averages which the Company was looking for.
We created fast-track courses for the small number of trainees who were academically ahead of the rest. But the high-flyers got the impression they were brighter than everyone else and thus did not need to work. Once they achieved a respectable GPA, they stopped trying. We threatened absentees with dismissal, but they were reinstated when their fathers complained. In short, nothing worked, and the teachers were rarely asked for an analysis of where the problems lay.
We could have told management for it was obvious to us that our trainees were ill-prepared from Grade One to Grade Twelve of the Saudi educational system. Both in grade school and in secondary school, trainees received up to four hours per day of religious instruction. Most had not had enough Science, or English, or History, or any of the background necessary for entrance to Western educational institutions. Their education was indoctrination into the Faith, and that was the mentality we were supposed to deal with. Our effort at producing scholars was like trying to teach Evolution to Mennonites.
Moreover, our charges were ill-prepared to take responsibility for their own learning, having been spoon-fed from birth. The boys were constantly losing the expensive calculators they were given for their Math courses. Notebooks, cell phones, pens, pencils, any and everything they were supposed to be taking care of just “got lost”. And the paternalistic Company generously replaced it all. The trainees paid for nothing and thus valued nothing. Their entire education was paid for, so they took it all as their birthright.
A Type of Apartheid
As for how we staff members were treated, at one meeting with senior management, we were told that there wouldn’t be any raises because teachers, like monks, were supposed to be working for love, not profit. Meanwhile, the execs, from the Principal up, had Company homes, Company cars, nice offices, and endless dinner parties. When one superintendent was promoted, the Company gave him a new automobile. Others got computers.
But this wasn’t the only form of inequity. We instructors were paid differently, not according to function or to qualifications. Americans were paid in US Dollars, Canadians in Canadian Dollars, Australians and Brits in Saudi Riyals. It made a huge difference, with Americans paid at least 30% more than the rest of us. Teachers from regional Arab countries fared the worst, although their chances of physical survival were better.
Differential treatment extended even to working hours during the month of Ramadan. Muslims were allowed to go home three hours earlier than the rest of us. The rationale for this was that these employees were celebrating most of the night, while the rest of us were snoozing away. During Ramadan, too, non-Muslims were at first prevented from accessing drinking fountains lest fasting Muslims be tempted to follow suit. The training center’s fountains were simply shut off.
In subsequent years it was decided to leave the fountains on, but non-Muslim employees had to hide in their offices to eat their lunches lest Believers be “offended.” All Muslims were expected to fast. Needless to point out, such forms of differential treatment was a constant source of irritation for no Arab ever asked what offended us.
Life in the Gulf tended to run along predictable lines, notwithstanding the occasional compound being blown up. At first, several were, but not in our area. Still, camouflaged Saudi military vehicles started to appear at compound entrances, along with razor wire running the length of perimeter walls. These walls were heightened, close-circuit TV cameras were added; bright lights were installed. All of these measures were intended to make foreign workers more at ease. However, I noted that the large machine guns atop of the Hummers lacked ammunition belts. The Saudi military did not trust its own soldiers. At one foreigners’ compound, private rent-a-cops disappeared during prayer times, with the front gate left unattended. So much for security.
When bored, go shopping
Some Progress
Over the space of seven years, I noted some changes in Saudi Arabian society. Whether these were uniform across the land, I don’t know, but from what I have heard they were.
Over the last eight to ten years Saudi men had begun taking their womenfolk out to dinner. This means that restaurants began to accommodate mixed genders where previously it had been men only. In coffee shops like Petite Francais, or in fast food places like McDonald’s, or in Lebanese restaurants, you found “Family Sections” for husbands and wives and the kids.
On a rare occasion, accompanied by some Western women, a colleague and I wound up in one of these. We were sealed off from the single men’s section by a wall. However, this did not mean that we were now in the inner sanctum of Saudi family culture. On the contrary. Once a Saudi family entered the enclosure, waiters dutifully erected wooden screens to shield the Arab womenfolk from the rest of us “family” people. When there was no shield available, Saudi women would just raise their veils a jot to allow food to be shoveled in. Needless to add, we found the situation absurd.
It wasn’t like this all of the time. I used to go for Thursday breakfast at one hotel frequented by Westerners. Saudis must have felt more at ease here for they behaved in ways I found remarkable. Young Saudi men would arrive by themselves, to be joined moments later by veiled young women whose drivers were waiting outside. The women would remove their veils to expose their faces, while they kept their hair covered and their long black abayas on, cloaking their figures. This way the young men could see the girls while they chatted with them.
I found out some time later from one of my trainees that this was a forbidden form of “dating”. Couples could size each other up as potential marriage partners, and then leave as they had come, anonymously. This more modern approach to finding a mate stands in contrast to the practice of young men and women being paired up by kinfolk, a tradition that continues especially in the interior of the country.
Kin to this form of meeting is “telephone dating”. This you saw on Thursday evenings in the glitzy shopping mall in Al Khobar. Sometime after eight, dozens of young men would shuffle around in small groups, trying to catch the eyes of girls who pretended to be shopping, oblivious to the many admirers they attracted. All the while the genders were checking each other out. When girls or boys wanted to make contact with the other sex, they would innocently drop a piece of crumpled up paper with their mobile phone number scribbled on it. The boy, or girl, would pick it up and call the other for a chat. Just what came of these electronic romances, I don’t know.
In a town where one did not have any relatives who could arrange marriages, this form of “dating” was a necessary step forward. But, I saw one fierce-looking Saudi cleric on TV who condemned this practice. Yet I doubt if too many boys and girls took note. Many young people I had the privilege to meet expressed great dissatisfaction with the retro slide of their religion. They wanted to join the modern world while their fanatical clergy was bent on taking a different direction. Others, of course, saw in the backsliding of Islam a golden opportunity to become leaders. These were the wannabe mutawa, youngsters with scraggly beards and a defiant glare in their eyes. It was these who presented the real danger to the future of Saudi Arabia.
Social Challenges
Another change I noted was the remarkable increase in the number of beggars on the streets of Al Khobar. When I arrived, I didn’t see any, not even during Ramadan when they usually play on people’s sense of obligation to give to the poor. What I did see during the last couple of years of my stay was an increasing number of veiled, older women outside the Safeway stores, holding out their hands for alms. Some had babies in their laps. At intersections too there were more poor children coming up to cars to ask for handouts.
At one point, I saw a scruffy boy of about thirteen leading an old, veiled woman, going from car to car asking for money. She looked stunned. It is possible that these weren’t Saudis, but if they were, it points to a deterioration of the welfare system that used to take care of those without the support of extended families. The increase in begging points to the fact that the economy can’t expand fast enough to meet the population explosion. It seemed to me only a matter of time before Saudi Arabia falls into chaos.
Just how big the population of the unemployed is became apparent when, over the course of three weeks, some twenty-five thousand applicants in their 20s, showed up day after day for some eight-hundred advertised training positions with our Company. The road to the Company’s employment office was jam packed with automobiles every morning as young men came in search of a future. The Company executive was stunned by the turnout, and so were we.
There are many graduates of technical colleges in Saudi Arabia who have no hope of ever finding work in their own country, but this is not because there is no work to be done. Rather, Saudis will only do non-manual work, and they expect superior pay, yet they don’t have the work ethic or skills to satisfy their employers. So, it’s no wonder that, in a land that has no labor unions of any kind, employers prefer to hire men from the Third World who expect far less and are willing to work six days per week, with a trip home only every two years. Is it any wonder then that many unemployed Saudis end up fighting in Iraq?
Self-Destructive Youth
The bleak future for young Saudi men has seen an increase in various forms of self destruction. Most notable of these was the reckless driving that ended in many tragic accidents. On the roads in and around Dhahran there are tire marks veering crazily across the pavement. Similarly, there are scrapes made by metal on walls of concrete embankments. These are made by youths driving at high speeds to leave their signatures on concrete, a sure sign of boredom. Often the outcome of such antics is visible in cars totally demolished on major highways.
Not a week went by in the last few years without fatal accidents reported in our Company intranet mail. One case, just before I left, was that of two boys in a car that, reportedly, went out of control and smashed full-force into the wall of a large European compound. Both boys were killed, and a third was found after the car was delivered to the wrecking yard. This eight-year old boy was wedged under the front seat by the impact of the vehicle slamming into the wall. There was some speculation that the crash had been a deliberate form of martyrdom.
Apart from the hysterical state of things, Saudi Arabia had some unique features that are worth mentioning. These are to be considered under the rubric of Islamic adaptation to modernity. For instance, new Women’s Banks began to crop up, while in older banks women-only entrances were created. This was so that Muslim women would not have to stand in line with predatory men. Women’s shopping malls emerged as well. Typically, these were for women and their children. McDonald’s had a separate teller only for “families”, even as most restaurants had sections sealed off from single males.
The loneliest creatures in the city tended to be single men of whatever ethnicity, for they were relegated to closed off sections at the back of coffee shops when family seating was a priority. Similarly on beaches like Half Moon Bay, single males had a difficult time finding a place to sit for most of the beach was designated “Families Only.” In Arabia, the lone male is seen as a threat.
By Western standards, life in Saudi is very pared down, and most of the time it is tedious. There are no cinemas except on a few elite Western compounds; films and videos that have recently become available to the general public are highly censored. The Internet is being increasingly censored by the Saudi authorities. Women are still banned from driving, as they are banned from traveling without male relatives, even within their own country. And whenever foreigners want to get out, they first have to retrieve their passports from their employers and get an exit visa. You can’t just leave. The end result of this way of life for me was a sense of tedium that I call flat lining, an emotional/intellectual numbness in which people are neither happy nor sad; they are just diminished.
The Perfect Religion
In The Brothers Karamzov, Dostoevsky has one of his characters explain that mankind needs miracle, mystery, and authority. How right he was. Islam provides all three, and in Saudi Arabia it has produced the perfect state, with most of its illiterate citizenry awed by the mystery and miracles of religion, while the terrible authority of Allah and his worldly enforcers keep everyone intellectually numbed.
However, the problem facing the imams, sheiks, and princes today is that the gig is up. The country can no longer feed, clothe, and house the teeming millions being born and indoctrinated into an ideology that holds work in contempt and thinks itself born to rule the earth. Miracle, mystery, and authority don’t put food on the table or provide work for the idle.
Since I began this article, a luxury compound in Al Khobar was attacked by three young gunmen wearing military uniforms. They shot up one office building, and then proceeded to the compound where I used to frequent the “Italian” restaurant for breakfast. There they murdered the Swedish chef, whom I knew slightly, and they slit the throats of at least six others like sacrificial lambs. However, unusual in this attack was that the gunmen separated Muslims from infidels, clearly hoping to regain some of the public support the terrorists had lost by killing indiscriminately during previous attacks. For the terrorists, a war on foreigners alone could not only be politically more profitable, it might greatly appeal to fundamentalist Saudis who are now in the habit of raging at a world they are incapable of accepting.
I finally left Saudi Arabia when the Company wanted to send me to a remote desert town where there was even less to do than in Al Khobar. I would have been with even less teachable students. Since I had been in charge of one of the major improvements in the training centers curriculum, and had not missed more than three days of work in seven years, I saw this as punishment for having voiced criticism. You could think what you wanted, but the moment you opened your mouth, you were dead meat as far as the Company was concerned. I handed in my resignation.
As the time came to leave, I gave most of my possessions to the staff of the small compound where I then lived. When I went to the accounting office of the contracting company to pick up my final pay, I was surprised with bills for what I supposedly owed them. The accountants claimed I owed them a year’s commission, part of my salary, the money they would not be getting because I was leaving. When I reminded them of my years of loyalty, and the fact that they had made a thousand dollars a month for doing nothing, they reneged. Maybe they were somewhat ashamed, but I doubt it for contracting companies run on greed.
As a final insult, a couple of the firm’s accountants, whose children I had brought presents for from trips abroad, decided to fleece me before I left. I was an infidel after all, and infidels can’t be one’s friends in the fundamentalist conception of things. They demanded payment in cash for expenses they made up; otherwise they would hold onto my passport while my plane left without me. That remains my last impression of Saudi Arabia, and it is enduring.
I have come to think of the Mid-East region in terms that Jonathan Swift once used to describe Ireland: as one large insane asylum. The inmates are constantly in a riot, provoked by whatever reason, unable or unwilling to use their god-given power of rationality to find a way out of their self-induced madness.
I wish I were optimistic about Saudi Arabia and the entire region, but I am not. I only hope those young people who want a productive, joyful life can go elsewhere, mind their own business like the rest of us, and cultivate a toleration of human difference for we wont be seeing tolerance anytime soon in that part of the world.
The Madness Continues
