I’ve been interested in typography – the means through which language is made visible by the use of type. My interest surely started when I was a child and my father was responsible for the editing of a monthly magazine. There were always type specimen books around the house, each with hundreds of different type faces… the original face books, I guess.
My interest took on a more professional angle when I set type to earn a living while in college and then did my own magazine editing. In any event, I am pleased to discover a new typeface, Nassim, the first face for which Arabic and Latin alphabets were developed at the same time and selected as one of the best typefaces of 2011.
The faces, alas, are really for commercial use; licensing them is a costly proposition. To purchase licenses for both Arabic and Latin alphabets, in four weights, runs over US $700. They’re not really useful on the Internet, anyway, as at present they can only be embedded in Java script applications, which I avoid on this blog. Still, the face is very nice, I think.
Nassim
Reviewed by Thierry BlancpainNassim is a rarity in that its contemporary Arabic and Latin alphabets were developed synchronously. That multi-script process is what drives this idiosyncratic design at its core.
For a typeface designed for news, the variety in its shapes is at first sight astounding. But it makes all the more sense the longer you look at it. Early in his process, Titus Nemeth looked at the strong resemblance of the blackletter bastarda model to Arabic type. This search for a parallel between the Latin and the Arabic is a constant in the calligraphically inspired bi-script development of Nassim. The low stroke contrast, strong, asymmetric, and sturdy serifs, and a rather tall x-height informed the design of the Latin.
…
Yesterday, Saudi Gazette reported that 224 farms in the Jeddah area were using raw sewage for irrigation. Today, Arab News reports that the problem extends to the Mecca region as well. The article points out that there are ‘illegal farms’, usually run by ‘illegal aliens’, that is, visa overstayers, sometimes with the witting assistance of the Saudi land owners. This really doesn’t put ‘delicious’ into the food.
Veggie farms using sewage destroyed
ARAB NEWSMAKKAH: The Al-Umrah branch municipality in Makkah has destroyed nearly 25,000 square meters of illegal farms irrigated with sewage, a municipal official said recently.
“Laboratory tests revealed the produce of these farms such as watercress, radish, capsicum and beans was highly contaminated,” said chairman of the branch municipality Hassan Khankar.
He added the farms and their produce were destroyed in collaboration with officials of the Makkah governorate.
He added the municipality would continue inspections to discover if vegetable farms were using polluted water for irrigation.
…
An op-ed in Arab News calls current Saudi efforts to thwart corruption inadequate. The writer points out that even following a Royal Decree and the establishment of a Royal Commission to address corruption, it continues. The problem, she says, is that the measures taken so far only call for people to behave properly. If they thought it in their interest to behave properly, corruption wouldn’t be happening in the first place. What’s needed is stronger words, stronger punishments, stricter implementation of existing regulations, and more participation by citizens to report it.
Opinion: ‘Together against corruption’
FATIN BUNDAGJIFor those of you who are familiar with local news, the issue of corruption has become commonplace.
If you don’t read about it in media outlets, you will infer it through the Jeddah Floods… And if you can’t infer it, then you probably experience it in your occasional interaction with public institutions as and when you need their service.
Corrupt and unethical behavior is so entrenched in our system that we actually need a royal decree to combat it. And ironically enough, even this highest mandate commissioned to eradicate corruption “once and for all” seems impotent against its spread.
…
Saudi Gazette runs a Reuters article on the power of tribalism in Saudi society and politics. It reports that some see that power rising; others dispute this. They see that the efforts of King Abdulaziz to settle the Bedouin led invariably to a decrease in their power.
It’s clear, though, that the tribes still have some residual power. Over the past few years, there have been notorious cases where tribalism has been used to disrupt existing marriages, to the embarrassment of Saudis in general. While Saudi history was build on tribalism and the Bedouin ethic, change has happened. Saudi society is now predominantly urban; skills needed in the past are no longer relevant. That does not mean that the values of the past are necessarily defunct, but they have a much harder time asserting their assumed worth for a modern society.
Tribalism still lingers for some
Angus McDowall — ReutersRIYADH — The gentle clicking of Sheikh Abu Samir’s prayer beads as he lounged against a bolster in his camel-hair tent evoked the wilderness of Saudi Arabia’s desert, not a dusty camel market beside a Riyadh motorway.
The Kingdom’s Bedouin might have forsaken a desert lifestyle that brought more hardship than riches, but their tribal identity retains a lingering influence in modern Saudi life and one that some Saudis believe may be enjoying a revival.
“(Tribal feeling) is growing,” said Saad Al-Sowayan, a Saudi anthropologist who specializes in Bedouin oral history.
While experts debate whether that is true and why, the authorities, whose success in building a modern state was in part dependent on settling the Bedouin and ending centuries of infighting, have shown themselves concerned enough to take steps to curb any resurgence of tribalism.
The government two years ago closed a television station after it broadcast poems glorifying tribal rivalry, according to local media.
“The tribes are still strong,” said Abu Samir, a chief in the Otaiba tribe, as he drank tiny thimbles of Arabic coffee with companions in a tent among the pungent animal pens of the camel market. “But the olden days were better.”
“You cannot expect tribalism to disappear over one, two or three decades. It takes longer than that,” said Khalid Al-Dakhil, a political scientist in Riyadh.
…
Dr. Ayed Al-Qarni, a latter-day liberal on several social issues and popular author, has been caught plagarizing the work of a young Saudi writer. He was fined a significant sum – SR 300K or US $80,000 – and the offending work was pulled from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. He also wrote somewhat of an apology.
His apology seems a bit insincere, however, as he appears to go to great lengths to explain how the unacknowledged lifting the work of others has a long tradition in Islamic culture. It may be that he is sincere in his belief, but that belief has been superseded by copyright law around the world. I guess it’s just another aspect of the change being forced on Saudi Arabia by belonging to an interdependent and closely linked world.
Ayed Al-Qarni fined SR300K for plagiarism
Naeem Al-Hakeem | Okaz/Saudi GazetteJEDDAH – The Ministry of Culture and Information has fined the well-known author and intellectual, Dr. Ayed Al-Qarni, SR300,000 for plagiarism.
The ministry’s Intellectual Copyright Committee found that Al-Qarni had copied some chapters from a book “Thus they defeated the desperate” authored by Salwa Al-Aededan, a young female Saudi writer. He had copied the chapters without acknowledging the source of the material.
Al-Aededan subsequently lodged a complaint against Al-Qarni.
The ministry ordered that Al-Qarni’s book be removed from bookshelves in the country.
In a 1,000-word message to the young female author on his website, Al-Qarni appeared to apologize and admit his mistake, and at the same time tried to defend his actions.
“People of knowledge usually benefit from each other without referring to the source,” he wrote.
…
If this Arab News article is intended to reduce Saudi Arabian families desire to have a housemaid or driver, it just might succeed.
The article points out that having a maid can often compromise family privacy. That this is news is a bit astonishing, but that’s the focus. Inviting a third party to live with you, to see you at your most relaxed – and therefore incautious – is to invite gossip and gossip mongering. Maids, after all, are human and gossip is a human activity, engaged in by males and females alike. It is currency in social commerce. If the servants are treated badly or underpaid, then there’s a likelihood that the gossip will turn malicious and thus be more valuable to them! Short of hiring servants unable to speak, the only solution is to not hire maids and drivers in the first place.
Whether Saudis will desire to do so will depend on which they value more, privacy or comfort.
Maids irk Saudis by washing families’ dirty linen in public
JOUD AL-AMRI | ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: Saudi households claim their private affairs are being made public by their own domestic workers such as maids and drivers.
They said inevitably their friends and relatives find out about what goes on in their private lives.
Some of these workers gossip about what goes on in their households to friends and family working in the households of neighbors or other relatives. Some of them go further and use such secrets as a blackmail weapon.
Some Saudi families refuse to take their housemaids with them when they go out to visit friends or relatives. However, sometimes it is not possible to do this on certain occasions.
Speaking to Arab News, some Saudi families said they resorted to various techniques to keep their secrets away from their housemaids and drivers but admitted they were not always successful.
…
One of the hallmarks of King Abdullah’s tenure has been his effort to reform Saudi law. A big part of that has been aimed toward the codification of laws, that is, writing down what the law says and how its breaches should be punished. Doing so would avoid the unseemly instances where two people, found guilty of essentially the same crime, are punished in vastly different ways. I’ve been writing about this here for the past five years.
The most recent example of this is where a man convicted of practicing witchcraft/black magic received a prison sentence and flogging, while just a month earlier, a woman convicted of the same crime was executed.
Foreign Policy Magazine has a timely article addressing the issue of codification and why it is so hard to achieve in Saudi Arabia. It’s not impossible, but very difficult, the article concludes. The difficulty stems from the Saudi attitude and belief that law comes exclusively from God and mankind has narrow scope within which he can control or channel it. The article is well worth reading in full…
Why won’t Saudi Arabia write down its laws?
Nathan J. BrownIn 2007 and 2009 Saudi King Abdullah capped a decade of legal and judicial reforms in his country by reorganizing the judiciary and ordering that Saudi Arabia follow the step that virtually all other states in the region did long ago by codifying its laws — committing to paper a comprehensive compendium of the operative laws in the kingdom. Since that date, however, his order has been neither challenged nor implemented. Why is codification of law seen as such a dramatic step in Saudi Arabia? And why does the king seem incapable of making it happen?
Saudi kings devoted considerable attention in the first decade of the 21st century to remaking the judicial order. Initial steps taken were new procedure laws with new decrees insisting (with uncertain effectiveness) that courts follow prescribed rules in their operation — and making the courts, always ambivalent about the role of lawyers, friendlier to the legal profession. In the most recent moves, besides ordering codification, the king consolidated all sorts of quasi-judicial bodies that littered the legal framework of the kingdom, wrenched adjudication functions away from the Supreme Judicial Council (handing them to a newly created Supreme Court), and relieved the country’s highest-ranking judge, a pillar of the old order, from his office at the head of the system. The king’s steps were sufficiently dramatic — and the identity of the Saudi state so deeply enmeshed in claims to be fully Islamic, especially in its legal structure — that longtime Saudi legal scholar Frank E. Vogel, in “Saudi Arabia: Public, Civil, and Individual Shari`a in Law and Politics,” termed them “not a shot but a barrage across the bow of his partners in rule, the conservative religious establishment” and “clearly seismic events within the world of Saudi shari`a politics.”
…
[Thanks to Talal for the pointer.]
In his Arab News column, Abulateef Al-Mulhim gives a heartfelt description of the plight that faces many expat workers in Saudi Arabia: They’ve been in the KSA so long that they no longer have a home back in their ‘home countries’. It’s even worse for their children. Not only have these expats grown distant from their families and friends ‘back home’, not only have many of those connection been broken by death, but they even lose facility in their supposed own languages.
Al-Mulhim notes that there are Saudi laws governing the gaining of citizenship. The laws aren’t bad, he says, but they need to be applied more humanely, on a case-by-case basis to account for those who, having chosen a new life in the Kingdom, have no life in the places they left behind.
The Saudi government has, I know, taken a look at loosening citizenship laws. It has done so to some minor extent. It has, of preference, chosen to take another route: to prevent expats from spending so much of their lives out of touch with their homes. Instead, foreign workers would come in under fixed-term, non-renewable contracts. At their conclusion, the worker would have to leave. If he chose to stay outside his home country, then that would be his decision and would no longer weigh on the head of Saudi employers or state.
There are, of course, inefficiencies in doing that. Not only would it require more international travel, but also having to repeat training programs as new employees came in to replace departing ones. Is the efficiency offset by the humanity of this approach? I think it likely is.
The expatriate who forgot his home address
ABDULATEEF AL-MULHIMWhen I was in elementary school in Al-Ahssa, Saudi Arabia, in the 1960s, I was taught by some Arab teachers from Arab countries such as Sudan, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Syria.
And it turned out that some of them are still in Saudi Arabia after all these years; some of them have been living here for more than 45 years. And about 30 years ago my older brother brought an Indonesian nanny for his first child. It turned out that after 30 years in the Kingdom, she doesn’t want to go back to Indonesia. And more than once, she was paid extra money just to persuade her to visit her relatives. But, two days after her arrival to Jakarta, she turns around and makes a reservation to come back to Saudi Arabia. Now, she is part of the family and not a nanny any more.
Just a few weeks ago, a friend of mine wanted me to join his father’s company as a consultant. The day I went to the company I met an Egyptian engineer who simply knew my cousins and friends by their first names. It turned out that this engineer has been in the Kingdom so long he didn’t want to tell me, because he didn’t want to reveal his age. There was an Indian in Dammam named Ali Koya who lived in the Kingdom for almost 40 years, and I can recall many more examples such as these.
…
Saudi Gazette/Okaz report on new security measures being undertaken to assure the security of Saudi Arabia’s northern and southern borders. Both include fences as well as high-tech equipment and aerial surveillance. The goal is to stop illegal border crossings, whether for smuggling purposes or infiltration of terrorists or illegal immigrants.
New measures to improve border security — Official
Mansour Al-Shihri | Okaz/Saudi GazetteRIYADH — The General Directorate of Border Guards has announced a range of new measures to improve border security. Under the new plan Border Guards personnel will be equipped with radars, cameras and marine sensors to detect ships.
The announcement comes as work on the northern border security fence is almost complete. Another security fence will be installed along the southern border.
Lt. Gen. Zameem Al-Siwat, Director of Border Guards, said the security fences built along the 890-km northern border will prevent anyone from sneaking in or out and any type of smuggling. As for the southern border, multiple-task radars, visual cameras, laser search machines and marine sensors will be installed.
…
An interesting piece in Saudi Gazette about a doctor who performs sexual assignment surgery. This type of surgery is performed on a person who is born in what is called an ‘intersex state’, that is, there is ambiguity about whether the person is male or female. Given Saudi Arabia’s social and cultural attitudes toward gender, it’s not surprising that the issue would take on great importance (not that it doesn’t in less sexually segregated societies, of course).
The article doesn’t get into the precise details of what sorts of sexual ambiguity are being addressed. The doctor notes that he has, for example, helped three married women become male. He says, too, that he treats only medically – that is, physically – necessary cases, not cases of psychological identification problems. The article states that he has performed 450 operations, but doesn’t give us any reference point to know whether this is a very high number (I assume it is, else why write about it) or where that number stands in the realm of all similar cases.
Sexual ambiguity is what the doctor appears to be addressing. This is not typical of humans, but it’s not exactly rare, either. Estimates put it as anywhere from 1/1000 to 1.7/100 births. Since Saudi Arabia, due to customary marriage practices, has a higher than normal incidence of certain genetic disorders, it would be interesting to learn whether this intersexuality occurs at higher than normal rates as well. A 2004 study from the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center (KFSHRC) suggests that consanguinity is a major factor and that genetic counseling should be encouraged for would-be parents.
The article reports that women are more welcoming of surgery than are men. This isn’t particularly surprising in light of the favored position males have in Saudi society. The whole issue of sexual assignment or re-assignment surgery is a fraught one. Currently in the West, there’s a strong movement to postpone such surgery until the child is able to make its own decision, after it develops its own sense of gender identity. This is acknowledged in the KFSHRC study.
Saudi doctor performs 450 ‘sex-correction’ operations
JEDDAH — A well-known Saudi surgeon claims that he had performed 450 operations over the past 30 years to change the sex of patients suffering from gender problems. His patients include three women who became men after marriage.
Prof. Dr. Yassir Saleh Jamal, head of the sex correction surgical center at King Abdulaziz University Hospital here, said he had refused to perform operations on many persons seeking to change their gender since they did not have any sex problems.
He said his refusal was because such operations were against the Islamic code, adding that most of them were women seeking to be converted into men to receive a bigger share of their family inheritance.
…
Saudi Gazette reports that for every Saudi finding a job last year, nearly 15 foreign workers were hired – 14.59, to be exact. Now, on the whole, there’s a certain apples-oranges comparison going on here. Many, if not most of the jobs the foreign workers were hired to do are jobs that Saudis don’t particularly want to do themselves: construction, street cleaning, ditch digging, agriculture. Both working conditions in those jobs and the salaries they pay don’t match up with the expectations of even high school graduates.
Some of that mismatch of expectations, though, can be changed. Those jobs are all critical to society; they are all honest jobs. They lack ‘status’, however. They’re not jobs likely to sway a potential bride or her family. Taking some of the jobs would even be seen as a challenge to family honor. Changing opinions about the status of jobs is not an easy task. It’s definitely not something a government program will fix overnight. Instead, it’s going to take time and a multifaceted suite of programs to effect a change.
Saudi Arabia has been able to insulate its youth from low status jobs because of its ability to hire cheap labor abroad. That labor is growing increasingly expensive, though, as source countries develop and raise salaries. There’re also pressures within the Kingdom to improve workers’ conditions and salaries that make them more expensive. And of course, there’s the high level of unemployment among Saudis.
I think the point of the article is to put out stark figures in order to focus society’s attention on just how dependent they are on foreign workers and how out of balance employment is.
1.7m expats, 116K Saudis hired in 2010
JEDDAH/DAMMAM — A Ministry of Labor report on hiring citizens and recruiting expatriates shows that 116,481 citizens were employed while 1.7 million expatriates were recruited in the fiscal year 2009-10. The expatriates included 1.1 million individuals recruited for the private sector, 565,000 to work as housemaids and 68,000 to work for the public sector, the report pointed out.
Of the 116,481 citizens, 60,481 were hired through the ministry’s e-gate and labor offices while 56,000 were hired directly in the private sector, according to the report.
…
Of course, even non-skilled or semi-skilled labor requires some level of skill. You can’t just grab someone off the street and put them to work. Technical and vocational education are intended to fill the gap and the Saudi government does offer that level of education.
Arab News reports that there aren’t enough schools providing that training, though. Only 28% of applicants can find a place in the various vocational schools. So, the government is investing SR 2 billion (US $533 million) in 22 new vocational training projects. The projects include programs for women in all provinces of the country. I’m a bit surprised to see pilot training included as I’m not sure there’s that big a demand for pilots in the country. But the job does carry some status, if, that is, a job results from the training.
SR2bn projects boost vocational training
ARAB NEWSRIYADH: The Technical and Vocational Training Corporation (TVTC) plans to launch SR2 billion worth of projects including a civil aviation academy in Jeddah in 2012. “TVTC projects include the establishment of institutes for training especially in strategically significant fields such as an academy for civil aviation in Jeddah, completion of an institute of aircraft maintenance in Riyadh and an institute for petroleum technologies in Al-Khafji in the Eastern Province,” TVTC Gov. Ali Al-Ghafis said in a statement on Saturday.
The projects also include higher technical institutes for women in all provinces.
Al-Ghafis added while the new projects being studied and designed are worth more than SR1 billion, projects that still need contractors are worth SR478 million and projects being launched are worth SR771 million. He said the new projects would accommodate the growing number of youths interested in advanced technologies, while currently TVTC can provide seats to only 28 percent of applicants.
…
OK, what are we to make of this?
Last month, Saudi Arabia executed a 60-year-old woman for practicing witchcraft, black magic. This month, a man is found guilty of practicing black magic. He gets to keep his head, though, and is instead sentenced to 15 years in prison and 1,500 lashes. Other than the sex of the offender, what’s the difference?
There might be a difference that matters, but I don’t know what it is. The woman was a Saudi; the man, an ‘African’. Is the different treatment intended as an object lesson to Saudis? Was there a significant difference in the amount of money involved? This Arab News piece clearly identifies the man as a ‘con artist’, noting that his con was black magic. Reports on the woman’s case identified her as a ‘witch’, noting that she conning the innocent. Is it simply a matter of which crime gets the headline?
Con artist gets 1,500 lashes, 15 years in prison
ARAB NEWSJEDDAH: The Riyadh General Court has handed 15 years and 1500 lashes to an African con man who practiced black magic, local daily Al-Eqtisadiah reported Thursday.
On receiving complaints from some victims, detectives started investigations and discovered the sorcerer’s hide out. They arrested the sorcerer red-handed after a sting operation. Police also seized magical potions, amulets, special herbs and other tools of sorcery from him.
Black magicians thrive on problems related to disagreement between husband and wife. Some of them claim that they can make a woman love or hate a particular man or vice versa. They also claim that they have the power to make people win in business, court cases or in other situations. Some of them also claim that they have genii under their control.