Cell phones and their related technologies are proving difficult to absorb fully into Saudi society. Today, both Arab News and Saudi Gazette run pieces on how the phones are viewed as (if not actually are) dangerous to the way Saudis do things.
This piece focuses on the presence of camera-equipped cell phones in girls’ schools. The cameras are uniformly forbidden, in order to prevent unauthorized pictures of the young women’s faces from being broadcast at large. As many women (and men) consider women’s faces to be private, thus the proclivity toward veiling, they simply don’t want their pictures appearing on various Internet sites or shuttled among the cameras of strangers.
Phone seizures lead to girls school riot
Wael Abdullah | Arab NewsMAKKAH: Female jail wardens were brought into a girls’ school in Makkah on Monday after students went on a rampage in protest over the confiscation of their mobile phones. The students also attacked the school principal for confiscating their phones.
Police arrived at the girls’ school in the city’s Mansour district after receiving a call from the principal’s husband that his wife was besieged in her office by a group of angry students.
Wardens from a women’s prison were finally brought in to break the siege and rescue the principal. During the riot, girls broke tables and chairs and opened gas cylinders.
The rioting happened after the principal and her assistant found seven camera phones, makeup items and perfume in classrooms while students sat exams. Bringing such items are against the school’s rules.
Once exams were over, students whose mobiles and other possessions were taken rushed to the principal’s office to protest. The principal’s husband said he called the police after receiving a telephone call from his distraught wife.
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This Saudi Gazette piece focuses more on a technology—Blackberry—that is used to transfer images and data between similarly-equipped phones. Articles appearing over the past several years have noted how Blackberry phones have been used to try to solicit phone numbers and photos of complete strangers met on the streets or in the malls. The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice are still trying to find ways to bring the technology and its use under some sort of control. In the Saudi social context, the phones just make it too easy to violate both Shariah law and social mores.
Hai’a eye on Blackberry misuse
RIYADH – The Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the Hai’a) in Riyadh is keeping an eye out for the “misuse” of Blackberry technology.
Turki Al-Shulail, the regional spokesman for the Hai’a, told Al-Riyadh newspaper late last week that staff members were “equipped to deal with Blackberry technology” and that any misuse “such as harassing women, blackmail and other things” would be dealt with in accordance with regulations.
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February:09:2010 - 18:07
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February:10:2010 - 08:53
In my personal view, its not technology which is at fault here.. I assure you that there are many incomptent people in important positions that lack the skills to resolve problems in proper etiquite. The younger generations are more technologically aware, prohibiting an item without understanding it or the user attachment to it in consideration would leave a lot of room for things to go wrong.
Sure students can be impudent brats.. but that even doesn’t make them that many of them join a riot without being provoked.
February:10:2010 - 10:00
A little off topic. I wonder how Saudi Arabia would cope with airsoft guns. I am going to try to get some here. That or on a plane. However, I hand it over at the counter in a locked box telling them “This is a toy!”
February:10:2010 - 12:44
Whats with the spate of articles detailing students and cell phone riots etc? Here and other places. One wonders how it is Arab girls can get bent out of shape, and potentially riot or cause problems, over something like their phone being taken…but not over the fact that they are second class citizens in their own country. hmmm?
February:10:2010 - 18:42
The papers have noted riots at boys’ schools, too. There, the issue has mostly been cheating.
February:12:2010 - 01:19
Cell phones are Saudi women’s babies. There is an umbilical cord cord between the two. The further you separate the two, the greater the risk you endanger the baby’s life.
Generally they will use them to chat and exchange pictures, videos etc. I allow the student’s babies to be visible as long as they are not using them. If they try to hide them and do something, I don’t make a big deal of it because at least their motor mouths are shut. I tell my students to put their babies to sleep and they laugh. I have had an issue with one particular student when I got a flash from her camera. I told her “Please don’t take a photo of me”. See some of these girls do and have when they don’t like a teacher and you can imagine what happens to the picture. The same girl was talking on the phone to tell another student to come to class because I was taking roll. I took her phone. I tolerate the psychological attachment to the phones as long as it doesn’t get ridiculously in my face like I am talking to the class and a student is talking on the my phone. I say to them if you have a call, take it outside which includes answering it outside. Them seem to respect that rule especially when I took that particular student’s phone. She physically grabbed my arm and said, “Please teacher.” I was thinking “Oh no she didn’t.” I said, “Look, your phone is always flashing pictures and you are talking on it while I am teaching…I am taking your camera and get your hands off of me now.” Needless to say she took her hands off of me because I was ready to knock her out. Anyhow, my students seem to respect my bit of leniency but within boundaries.
February:12:2010 - 11:34
I have student patients who take calls during their psychotherapy session–usually only once, then they get the idea from the look on my face. The recalcitrant, defiant, are welcome to waste their therapy time on the phone, but most figure out they could just–turn it off for an hour and lie, I mean be vague, about where they were.
February:12:2010 - 19:28
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