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.
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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.”
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[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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
While Saudi Arabia goes through a process of change – slow and laborious as it may be – some Saudis are complaining about the lack of another kind of change: the 50 halala coin. The coin, representing half a Saudi Riyal in value (about $0.27) is in short supply, apparently. As a result, shop owners are either giving a packet of chewing gum or other sweet, suggesting that the change be donated to charity (with no proof that that is actually happening), or simply pocketing it.
This situation is a failure of government in manufacturing a sufficient supply of the coin. It’s not at all the same as the movement in the US to abolish the penny because its value is less than its cost of manufacture; 50 halalas are worth something. Merchants who do not or cannot provide the change are making a bit of excess profit here as what they provide instead not only costs less than the 50 halalas, but there’s no accountability on where the excess goes… other than the merchant’s pocket, that is.
Sweets as a substitute for change is not unique to the Kingdom, far from it. Many countries have seen periods where low-value coinage were in insufficient supply. But it is a problem and one that falls squarely at the feet of government.
We want 50 halala coins, not chewing gum, say Saudi youth
Mona Al-Sharif | Okaz/Saudi GazetteJEDDAH – Saudi youth have launched a campaign called “Change is Chewing Gum” on Facebook to speak out against the growing practice of store owners to offer chewing gum instead of the 50 halala coin.
The campaign seeks to preserve the value of coins and check, what it calls, “the greed of supermarkets”, which deprives customers of the 50-halala change.
Mashael Al-Shabeeb, faculty member at King Saud University in Riyadh, said the campaign has been lauded by many sections of society, especially those who want to preserve the value of coins in the Saudi currency.
When asked about who should be held responsible for this phenomenon of replacing change with chewing gum, Al-Shabeeb said the problem wasn’t about giving chewing gum instead of a 50-halala coin, but rather it was about prices.
“Most price tags have 50 halalas added. We want traders to change the price and take away the added halalas. We no longer see 50 halala coins.”
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Saudi media are looking at the appointment of Sheikh Abdullatif Al-Sheikh as the new head of Saudi Arabia’s Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice and is finding a lot to like. Asharq Alawsat‘s profile, [See link] notes him as more liberal than many on women’s issues, including employment, but also stretching to the hijab and child marriage. He has spoken openly and since his appointment about employment issues; we’ll have to see how he acts on the others.
Saudi Gazette reports that he’s already instituted a change in the way the Commission will react to reports of misbehavior: It will ignore anonymous complaints.
Hai’a won’t respond to unverified complaints
RIYADH – The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (the Hai’a) will not respond to reports unless the person making the complaint identifies himself or herself and the information is verified, said Sheikh Dr. Abdullatif Bin Abdulaziz Aal Al-Sheikh, General President of the Hai’a.
He also said that the Hai’a will only deal with reports that fall under its jurisdiction.
Hoaxes and false reports were the main cause for criticism of the performance of the Hai’a staff, Aal Al-Sheikh said in a statement.
He said the Hai’a was striving to change its image, adding that he sought the cooperation of all Hai’a staff in achieving this objective.
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Back to Asharq Alawsat, where Hussein Shabokshi see Al-Sheikh as a breath of fresh air inspiring the Commission, an organization that the majority of Saudis believe necessary to their society. He compliments him for taking action in barring volunteer mutawwa as a critical step in fixing the organization’s image and function. He notes, too, that the Sheikh is aptly named, too. Abdullatif means ‘Servant of the Kindly’ [God] while his surname indicates his descent from Muhammad ibn ?Abd al-Wahhab, eponymous founder of the conservative trend of Islam followed by the Saudi majority.
Shabokshi writes that as Saudi Arabia finds its way through a period of major reforms, in society as well as law, it’s critical to have leaders capable of dealing with change. He squarely puts Al-Sheikh in this column.
A new chapter in the history of the Hesba
Hussein ShabokshiTalking or writing about the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice [CPVPV] in Saudi Arabia is an extremely complex and thorny issue due to the common understanding that criticizing – or even expressing an opinion about – this organization represents an objection to religion itself. Hence, whoever ventures to discuss this matter is exposed to a volley of accusations, as is often the case. The CPVPV, or the “Hesba” as it more commonly known, is an organization that is unique to Saudi Arabia. With a few exceptions, no other country in the world has a similar institution or organization. This organization was established shortly after the unification of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and soon became part of the state’s administrative tools regulating public affairs.
The CPVPV has undergone various phases of development and expansion to its mandate. Saudi society has changed over the years, witnessing a sharp increase in its population, as well as different lifestyles appearing on the scene. In addition to this, the youth have begun to interact with public life; women have become more open to the idea of employment, whilst there has also been a sharp increase in the proportion of foreign labour. Accordingly, demands were made for these new developments to be taken into account, and for a change in how the CPVPV dealt with such issues. The CPVPV was previously a sitting duck for anyone wanting to criticize Saudi Arabia. Violations committed by certain members of the CPVPV would be viewed as part of a general flaw in Saudi society, whilst the most common description of the CPVPV in the western media is “religious police”, with all the unacceptable scornful connotations attached to this.
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[NOTE: Just for the sake of clarity: The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has several names used in common speech. The more common ones include: The Commission, Haya or Ha’ia, mutawwa/mutawwaeen or mutawwa’in, and religious police. Disfavored by the organization, but widely heard nonetheless, is ‘vice cops’. In his article, Shabokshi uses a term, Hesba, which I’d not previously encountered. Its meaning is clear enough, though. It’s an alternate spelling of hisba, the principle of ‘enjoining virtue and forbidding what is wrong’ through which the Commission draws its raison d’être.
Saudi Gazette/Okaz run an interesting, if macabre article about Saudi scholarship students who have died or gone missing over the past year. Given that there are at least 100K students studying outside the Kingdom, the numbers are not astonishing, though they are of course sad. More details would be interesting, but I don’t think they’d necessarily be any more illuminating.
Foreign ministry following up on dead, missing Saudi students
Saudi Gazette/OkazLOS ANGELES – The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been following up and resolving a number of cases involving Saudi students who have died or gone missing in the United States, Canada and New Zealand over the course of last year and the beginning of the new year.
Habib Bokhari, deputy director of the Saudi student affairs department at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles, told Okaz/Saudi Gazette that the father of missing student, Sultan Al-Dawsari, wants to keep all new information about the disappearance of his son confidential, unless he gives his approval for its release.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was notified that two Saudi students went missing and one died within a space of two weeks.
The Saudi Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, was notified about the disappearance of Hamza Al-Shareef whose case is still being investigated by the Canadian authorities.
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A piece in Arab News points to an interesting sociological phenomenon in Saudi Arabia, though I’m sure it’s not exclusive to the country…
While there’s minimal opposition to a father remarrying after a divorce, children really dislike it when their mother’s remarry, even after the death of her husband. I’m not sure that fathers’ remarriages are pain free, but Mom? That’s apocalyptic, it’s embarrassing, it’s OMG, FML!
So, loving children that they are, they’d rather have their mothers leading a lonely, celibate life than taking a chance at finding happiness. The children – at least some of the ones interviewed for this article – accuse Mom of being selfish, not thinking of the children and their reputations. Really? I’m pretty sure there are mirrors in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps this children should try looking in one.
I suspect that real issue is that they just don’t want to even think about their mother’s having sex. Marriage, after all, is the license to have sex in Saudi Arabia. And while these kids stand as living proof that their mothers are not virgins, they just can’t quite wrap their heads around that fact.
It’s yet another example of how Saudi women get the short end of the stick. This time again, it’s not law, but society that oppresses.
Why second marriage of mother is a taboo?
ARAB NEWSALKHOBAR: Saudis don’t usually like it when their mother gets remarried. But when it comes to their father, no one has a problem.
According to a report in Al-Riyadh Arabic daily, the sentiments that children have toward their mother and father are not the same. They might not mind if their father marries another woman but will fight tooth and nail if the mother tries to remarry.
To think of losing their mother’s affection to another man is impossible for them. It might be argued that they are too selfish to give their mother another chance at life. After spending her whole life serving them devotedly, they would prefer her to lead a lonely life.
Umm Muhammad a 52-year-old divorcee, shared her experience with the newspaper. She had received a proposal from a man who promised her a happy married life. He was also willing to support her children from the first marriage. Living alone in a house given by her previous husband, with no one to take care of her except a housemaid, she thought it would bring an end to her solitary life.
All five of her children were married and lived in separate houses. When they heard about the proposal, they got really upset. Muhammad, the eldest son, threatened to kill the man while her other son reminded her that she is now a grandmother. Her daughters were worried what their husbands and their families would think.
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Saudi Gazette quotes from a Saudi Press Agency release reporting that the Shoura Council has approved amendments to the media and publication law. The amendments, while well-intended, I’m sure, contain such vague wording that it will be difficult or impossible for the media to know exactly where the no-go lines are to be found.
‘Insulting and defamatory’ articles about individuals or government officials are banned. I’ve no problem with ‘defamatory’; false statements that paint someone in a bad light should be sanctionable. But who is to decide what is ‘insulting’? Where is the line between ‘insulted’ and ‘hurt feelings’? If ‘insult’ is to be criminalized, then it needs to be very closely defined in a manner that avoids subjective judgment.
Also banned are articles ‘that violate Islamic law.’ Which Islamic law/s? Who decides whether that law as been broken? Here again, a tight definition is necessary.
What about articles that complain about the actions or inactions of a government bureaucracy? They are not ‘defamatory’ if true, though they certainly could lead to more hurt feelings. More clarity would be helpful.
What about defenses to allegations of defamation? Are there affirmative defenses that bar legal proceedings against a writer or publication? If there are, the report does not mention them.
Perhaps this lack of clarity is due only to incomplete reporting. If that is so, then better reporting is called for. If the report is complete but the law is lacking, then it needs to be fixed in order to avoid chilling media discussion of issues of public importance.
Shoura approves anti-defamation law for media
RIYADH – The Shoura Council has approved amendments to the media and publications law which prohibits publishing insulting and defamatory articles about individuals and government officials.
This took place here at the 78th session of the Shoura Council, chaired by Sheikh Dr. Abdullah Bin Mohammed Bin Ibrahim Aal Al-Sheikh, Speaker of the council.
The amendments approved by the council include changes to five articles ordered under a Royal Decree issued last year.
Aal Al-Sheikh said the changes outlaw the publication of any article that violates Islamic law and the country’s Basic Law of Governance.
He said the Royal Order protects individuals and officials from being insulted and their public service work demeaned.
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