A Challenge to Saudi Culture

“I am correcting a big mistake, that is all,” said Prince Walid, sitting in his office high above Riyadh. “I want to tell Arab youth: You deserve to be entertained, you have the right to watch movies,

you have the right to listen to music.” (Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal, The New York Times, April 28, 2006)
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Prince Talal’s statement, quoted above, is a breath of fresh air in the oppressive, stifling and temporally static culture of Saudi Arabia. Apart from the external flash and dash of the petro-dollars, the culture is intellectually frozen and fifteen hundred years old; it is archaic and its proponents refuse to modernize. By itself, what happens in Saudi Arabia may not have any world-wide impact. Yet it might have a global impact in as much as the culture in the Muslim world is derived, by and large, from it.

The country does not have a single movie theater although a few are under construction without legal permission. Entertainment practically means sinfulness. One feels guilty when he/she is happy. When the Saudi Sheikhs hungered for native entertainment, they went to Beirut and Cairo because nothing was available nor allowed at home.

’Keif-al-Hal’, a first Saudi budget and featured movie, now seems to have slightly creak-opened a tightly sealed door on entertainment in Saudi Arabia which is still shackled by extremely puritanical Wahabism. The movie is produced by Rotana which is owned by prince Talal. Due to lack of the required infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, ’Keif-al-Hal’ was shot in Dubai. The script is written by an Egyptian. According to The New York Times, “In ‘Keif-al-Hal’ (How’s it Going?), a big budget film due out this summer, family members find themselves torn between modernity and tradition. The movie financed by a Saudi prince, aims not only to raise delicate questions but also to generate a Saudi movie industry and force the opening of theaters, some of which are reportedly under construction without licenses or legal status.”

According to Sam Dagher, “The movie is a comedy-drama which its makers say embodies the tension between moderates and religious extremists and the struggle, especially among the young, to embrace globalization while retaining Islamic values,” (The Standard, China’s Business Newspaper, March 23, 2006).

Prince Talal is an influential person in Saudi Arabia, the eighth richest person of the world, and can have his way in matters which are important and worthwhile to him. Rationalizing his unorthodox act of movie-making, he said, “There is nothing in Islam - and I’ve researched thoroughly – not one iota that says you can’t have movies. So what I am doing right now is causing change.” Change is the buzz word.

If an accommodation can be created for movie-making in the Shariah, there is hope that other outdated injunctions and practices can also be, and hopefully will be, abandoned. The prince is right that there is nothing in Islam that prohibits the movies because they were unknown in the prophet’s time. They did not exist even in human imagination at that time. The biggest hurdle in modernizing the Shariah is on the issues on which prophet’s examples and practice exist. Some reformers like prince Talal need to step forward and authoritatively assert that the old injunctions, Hudood laws, etc., and practices have become outdated and need to be modified or abandoned according to the needs of the modern times.

The central female role, that of Sahar, in the movie is played by a Jordanian actress, Mais Hamdan. The hero is played by the homegrown heart throb, Hisham-al-Huwaish. The role of the supporting actress is played by the Saudi actress, Hind Muhammad. Hind, 25, has worked for several years in Saudi radio operas and lent her voice in cartoons. Making and showing movies, even the children movies, was completely banned in Saudi Arabia. “Last year, a movie theater in Jiddah opened briefly to show children’s films, but the vice-patrol shuttered it within weeks,” (The New York Times).

In an ambience of such severe puritanism, Keif-al-Hal may prove an ice-breaker and usher an era of social change.

While the movies did not exist in the prophet’s time, there was nonetheless affluence of music. Music became such a controversial issue in the Muslim world that it is still debated whether Islam allows music or not. Whether Shariah allows it or not, music has become a de facto part of the Muslim life. Ironically, the word ‘music’ is derived from the Arabic word ‘mauseeqi.’

Life in the non-Saudi Muslim world goes on as usual without paying much attention whether music is ‘halal’ or ‘haram.’ Umm-e-Kalthum had captured the hearts of the Arab listeners with her enchanting music and in our sub continental sphere, there were Noor Jehan, Muhammad Rafi, Talaat Mehmood, and others. This hypocrisy has become the hallmark of the Muslim world. In due time, if music ever became a contentious issue, it would be Islamized one way or the other.

Why don’t we realize the fact that nothing in this world is permanent. Nothing stays the same. We need to change with the passage of time.

The move to movie-making however did not emerge abruptly without the help of other associated factors. The way was paved by the Arab novelists. There are several distinguished Arab writers including a few from Saudi Arabia. Those are “the late Abdelrahman Munif, former London ambassador Ghazi Algosaibi and Turki-al-Hamad,” (Lifting the Veil, James Buchan, Guardian, November 13, 2004). Munif’s Cities of Salt is well-known. According to Edward Said, this is “the only serious work that tries to show the effect of oil, Americans, and the local oligarchy on a Gulf country.” The novel was banned in Saudi Arabia.

Hamad was born in Jordan and later relocated with his parents as a child in Dammam. “His trilogy Atyaf-al-aziqah-al-majruah (Phantoms of the Deserted Alleys) is the story of a young man coming of age in Saudi Arabia in the years between the crushing defeat of the Arab armies by Israel in 1967 and the deluge of prosperity and corruption after the oil-price rises of 1973 and 1974,” (Lifting the Veil).

The first novel by an Arab (Saudi?) woman that I read was set in Saudi Arabia and in the U.S. The heroine was married to a prince who abused her without realizing that he indeed was doing so. The woman came over to the U.S. and dumped him and married a white American and lived happily afterwards. There were intrigues and conspiracies woven in the story. Unfortunately, I forgot the title and the name of the author. But I remember that it surprised me pleasantly. I had thought that there were no women novelists in Saudi Arabia.

Another novel that I read and remember its title and the author was “In the Eye of the Sun”. Its author is Ahdaf Souief who is an Egyptian and now lives in Britain. The novel is in the tradition of Tolstoy and other Russian novelists in that several different stories unfold concurrently with the main story (the novel is 792 pages long, paper cover version). I read most of it (almost two-thirds). It is impressive indeed. Another of her novel “Map of Love” was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

The award of Nobel Prize in 1988 to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz helped introducing the works of many Arab novelists to the western world. It also helped popularizing fiction writing in the Arab world. The government control and censorship, particularly in Saudi Arabia, is somewhat relaxed so that the Arab novelists are encouraged to write on social and political themes. They still have to be careful in determining how far they should go with adverse criticism of the government. With a degree of circumspection, they manage to write interesting stories on a variety of contemporary themes.

For example, Scot Wilson wrote an article “For Arab Writers, New Lines in the Sand” (Washington Post Foreign Service, March 16, 2005) in which he described Yousef Mohaimeed’s story “The Bottle.” He wrote, “Each day she sits alone, scribbling thoughts on scraps of paper. She stuffs them in a bottle given to her years earlier by her grandmother, who said it should serve as a place for private feelings that Arab society would not tolerate from a woman if uttered aloud. The bottle fills, the woman ages. The life it holds on a million pieces of paper remains undiscovered, stifled and secret.” Wilson also described, “.. a group of men entered a bookstore on one of the capital’s broad avenue, lined with designer boutiques and glass-and-steel shopping malls. They seized copies of “The Bottle” which includes an unflattering portrayal of an Islamic militant, after it had sold 500 copies in three days…”

Another notable Saudi fiction writer is Badrya Bisher. She started writing when she was in high school. Her mother, Haya, married her husband when she was 13 in the southern village of Aflaj. She tried to escape from her husband twice.

Bisher wrote, “I never heard a word my whole life from my mother that she loved him or that she was satisfied…I always ask why women of my mother’s generation didn’t ask why there were these rules…. We are always fighting about this. They think if you think too much the devil is trying to confuse you,” (Scot Wilson)

The theme of her short story “The Wednesday Night” is something like this: “The woman is waiting for her husband. She is alone, restless with worry, and the cold marble floor sends chills through her as she distracts herself with a thousand tasks. It is Wednesday night, the start of the Saudi weekend. She knows how the evening will end: Her husband drunk in a country where it is a flogging offense. She confronts him as he stumbles through the door. A slap cracks across her face. He is gone.”

These are tiny portents which show that the “holy of the holies” and the “mother of ultra-conservatism” that Saudi Arabia is, is trying to enter the modern world. Will it ever catch up with the rest of the world? Or, will it remain the backdrop of Bedouin culture that it has been for ages, is the question that only time will answer. At least, it seems that a start has been made.