Saudi Arabia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
168
Saudi Arabia - Culture Smart!: The Essential Guide to Customs & Culture
168eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781857335910 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kuperard |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2008 |
| Series: | Culture Smart! , #14 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Saudi Arabia
By Nicholas Buchele
Bravo Ltd
Copyright © 2008 KuperardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-85733-591-0
CHAPTER 1
LAND & PEOPLE
GEOGRAPHY
Saudi Arabia is a desert country about one-fifth the size of the United States, covering some 864,869 square miles (2,240,000 sq. km) of overwhelmingly arid land. And while the landscape can look much the same across the kingdom, the features that stand out do so spectacularly.
Only about 37 miles (60 km) south of the Red Sea port of Jeddah, an escarpment suddenly rises sheer some 1,640 feet (500 m) out of the flat land, and from there the mountains, including the 10,827-foot (3,300-m) Jabal Sawda, stretch ruggedly all the way into Yemen in the south.
The central rocky plateau of the Najd with the capital Riyadh is traversed by a number of wadis, or dry river beds, and isolated by three great deserts from north, east, and south. In the north, the An Nafud covers about 21,236 square miles (55,000 sq. km) at an elevation of some 3,280 feet (1,000 m), mostly with longitudinal dunes scores of miles long, as much as 295 feet (90 m) high and separated by valleys as much as 10 miles (16 km) wide, given a reddish tinge at sundown by the iron ore in the sand. To the east runs the Ad Dahna, a narrow band of sand mountains also known as the River of Sand.
To the south of the Najd lies the mother of all deserts, the Rub al-Khali or Empty Quarter, which covers more than 212,356 square miles (550,000 sq. km) of wandering dunes at higher elevations and sandy flatlands and salt flats lower down. In its far southeast are the fabled quicksands said to have swallowed whole caravans. Most of it is totally without water and uninhabited — hence the name — except for a handful of wandering Bedouin and a minimal number of plant and animal species.
To the east of the Ad Dahna lies al-Hasa, the country's largest oasis, which in fact consists of two neighboring oases including the town of al-Hofuf. It is on these fertile islands in the desert that the best of the kingdom's dates are grown.
Saudi Arabia is bordered by Yemen and Oman in the south, the Red Sea in the west, Jordan and Iraq in the north, and Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the east. Across a causeway in the Gulf lies the island kingdom of Bahrain, which offers many Saudis a little weekend respite from the restrictions of their own country.
CLIMATE
Most of the country has a desert climate, which means extreme dry heat during the day and abrupt temperature drops at night. In the Najd, temperatures rise commonly to 113°F (45°C) and can go as high as 129.2°F (54°C). This contrasts with the coastal areas of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, where the temperature only rises above 100.4°F (38°C) in the summer but humidity is usually more than 85 percent and often 100 percent. The winter is brief, seeing a few drops of rain on the coast and even some rare snowfalls in the interior. Asir in the deep south experiences Indian Ocean monsoons, usually between October and March.
Overall, rainfall is low and erratic: it may consist of one or two torrential downpours for the entire year that flood the wadis and then rapidly disappear into the soil. While average rainfall is 3.937 inches (100 mm) per year, whole regions may not see any rain at all for several years. For much of the country, water comes from huge desalination plants on the coast or from deep wells in the interior that are forever in danger of drying up.
POPULATION
Due to the nature of the terrain and the erratic ways of government, all population figures are rough estimates, in some areas arrived at simply by over-flying the territory. According to the latest estimates (2007), there were some 27.6 million people living in the kingdom, of whom about 5.6 million, or nearly one-fifth, were foreigners. One million each are estimated to come from India and Egypt, and they also include people as diverse as Filipinos, Americans, Sri Lankans, and Somalis. This leads to the paradoxical situation in which one of the world's most closed societies has one of the world's highest percentages of "aliens" living in its midst — the percentage is probably higher than the official figures since many of the foreigners there are no longer (or never were) legal residents.
Saudis themselves may at first glance seem an extraordinarily uniform people: the white thobe or ankle-length robe worn by men, topped by a checkered keffiyeh or ghutra, and the all-over black of the women's abaya and hijab make the men difficult and the women sometimes impossible to distinguish. Yet in reality they are very diverse. Essentially, the kingdom consists of four distinct regions and populations. Each region has some nomadic and seminomadic elements: as recently as 1950, at least half the population were nomads. Tribal identities remain hugely important.
The Eastern Province, where the oil wealth is concentrated, has a substantial Shia population with cultural links to Iran, Bahrain, and other places in the Gulf region, as well as a component of Indian, Yemeni, and black African origins.
Asir in the south is in fact more closely linked to Yemen than to Saudi Arabia, both by population and its mountainous geography: this is the home of the one-million-strong Al-Ghamdi tribe whose members played a key role in the 9/11 bombings and terrorist attacks targeting the Saudi state. Asir is also home to the Flower Men, a small tribe of non-Muslims surviving in the mountains, who adorn their headbands with sprigs of wild flowers and cultivate perfume.
The Najd in the center is divided into three regions, with town centers that were quasi-independent city-states until the early twentieth century, some bitterly opposed to the ruling clan. Until development began in the 1960s, the Najd was relatively isolated, but its towns had populations linked to the Gulf, the Hijaz, and Africa.
The Hijaz on the west coast, home to the holy sites of Islam, was historically tied into the Ottoman bureaucratic system. The populations of Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah have for centuries been infused by descendants of foreign Muslims who came for the pilgrimage and stayed.
Mecca has substantial communities of Indian and Indonesian origin, and Jeddah has descendants of Persians and Hadramis (from Hadramaut or Aden in Yemen), as well as Africans and people from other parts of the Arabic-speaking world. Jeddah was the kingdom's unrivaled commercial center until the 1960s, and in all the Hijaz towns, merchant families still form a powerful, liberal elite.
What most Saudis do have in common, perhaps, is a certain reticence in dealing with strangers — and indeed with each other: mutual regional prejudices run deep, and many Saudis declare themselves to be something else (such as Yemeni or Jordanian) due to their tribal affiliations or ethnic origins. They also, down to the poorest farmers, share a great personal pride and an upright, almost regal bearing.
A BRIEF HISTORY
Pre-Islamic Period
Arabs have from time immemorial been herders, traders, and raiders. Civilization developed in southern Arabia by about 1000 BCE. Small kingdoms or city-states — the best known is probably Saba, or Sheba in the Old Testament — were scattered across the land. The Romans called Yemen "Arabia Felix" (happy Arabia) because of its prosperity. Outside the coastal areas and a few centers in the Hijaz associated with the caravan trade, the harsh climate and desert limited agriculture and made the land difficult of access. The population in the hinterland probably subsisted on a combination of oasis gardening and herding, and most people were nomadic or seminomadic.
Cities that could service the camel caravans moving across the desert flourished. The most prosperous of these — Petra in Jordan and Palmyra in Syria — were close to the Mediterranean region, but small caravan cities developed on the Arabian peninsula as well. The most important was Mecca.
Some Arabs, particularly in the Hijaz, held religious beliefs that recognized multiple gods and rituals for worshiping them. They chiefly involved the sense that certain places and times of year were sacred. At those times, the near-permanent warfare between squabbling tribes, in particular, was forbidden, and various rituals were required. Foremost of these was the pilgrimage, and Mecca was the best-known pilgrimage site.
The Persians and the Romans were the great powers in the centuries before Islam, and the Arab tribes that lived near their territories were drawn into their political affairs. After 400 CE, both empires paid Arab tribes not only to protect their southern borders but also to harass the borders of their enemies. The time before Islam is generally referred to as jahiliyya, "the time of ignorance."
Early Islamic Period
Islam got off to a rocky start. When the Prophet Mohammed first began to preach this profoundly political religion, it angered his tribe, the Quraish, who controlled the pilgrimage traffic in Mecca and were custodians of the Kaaba, which was already the sacred shrine of a polytheistic religion and a pilgrimage destination. For Mohammed not only attacked such things as lax marriage arrangements, the treatment of women as chattels, and the killing of unwanted offspring, he also insisted there was only one God, thus potentially endangering the lucrative pilgrim traffic to the shrine.
In 615 Mohammed sent some of his followers to safety in Christian Ethiopia while he himself remained under siege in Mecca, but in 622 he fled to the town of Yatrib, some 200 miles (320 km) north of Mecca — his emigration marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. He renamed the city Al-Madinah al-Munawarrah, the City of Light, now mostly known as Medina for short. There, he took to raiding caravans for income, which incensed the Meccans who serviced them and prompted them to attack him repeatedly.
By 628, Mohammed had sufficient support to establish a truce with Mecca, finally conquering the city in 630 and smashing the three hundred and sixty idols in the Kaaba. He declared the territory surrounding the shrine haram (forbidden) to all non-Muslims, which it remains to this day. By his death in 632, Mohammed enjoyed the loyalty of almost all the tribes of Arabia.
Mohammed's successor Abu Bakr, the first of the "rightly guided" caliphs, asked Mohammed's former secretary Zaid ibn Thabit to write down all the Prophet's revelations still in people's memories, producing a proto-Koran. The scriptures were passed to his successor Umar and his daughter, and under Umar's successor Uthman, the same Ibn Thabit produced a standardized, "authorized" version.
THE PROPHET MOHAMMED
Mohammed was one of the most extraordinary men who ever lived. Born in 570 into the Quraish, the leading tribe in Mecca, he grew up illiterate and at twenty-five married Khadija, a wealthy widow fifteen years his senior who may have been his employer. Drawn to the monotheism of Christians and Jews, he withdrew to a cave to find the truth. In 610 he began to experience visitations of the angel Gabriel dictating to him the word of God; the resulting passages of masterful poetry, which he continued to produce throughout his life, were later collected from memory in the Koran — literally "recitations."
At first, Mohammed told only Khadija about his experiences, but in 613 he began to recite them publicly. Not surprisingly, his message of unity under one God was violently resisted by the pagan Meccans. Driven into exile in Medina, Mohammed proved to be a canny politician. He contracted many alliances, often, after the death of his first wife, through marriage. The most famous was with Aisha, who was seven at the time but was to become his favorite and most influential wife. Aisha is the source of many hadiths, the traditions of the Prophet's sayings, that form part of the wider Islamic canon.
Mohammed expected but rarely forced pagans to submit to Islam, and allowed Christians and Jews — the "People of the Book" whose own prophets are recognized by Islam — to keep their faith provided they paid a special tax.
In the two years until his death, Abu Bakr maintained the loyalty of the Arab tribes by force, and in the battles that followed the Prophet's death — known as the apostasy wars — he enforced Islam across the peninsula. For the next thirty years, caliphs managed the growing Islamic empire from Medina.
With the end of the apostasy wars, the Arab tribes united behind Islam and turned their attention to the Roman and Persian empires. Arab-led armies pushed rapidly through both empires and in record time established Arab control from what is now Spain to Pakistan.
However, the empire soon ceased to be controlled from Arabia, whose importance declined. After the third caliph, Uthman, was assassinated in 656, the Muslim world was split into Sunni and Shia. The first regarded themselves as "people of the Sunnah," followers of the way in which the Prophet and his followers lived. The second believed that spiritual authority was conferred through the descendants of the fourth caliph, Ali, who spent much of his time in Iraq before he was murdered in 661 in Kufa.
After Ali, the Umayyads established a hereditary line of caliphs in Damascus until they were in turn overthrown in 750 by the Abbasids, who ruled from Baghdad. By the latter part of the eighth century, a mere two centuries after the birth of the Prophet, the political importance of Arabia in the Islamic world had declined.
The Middle Ages
While Arabia became marginalized, Mecca remained the spiritual focus of Islam because it was the destination for the pilgrimage. But it lacked political importance, which lay in Medina. After the Prophet's death, Medina continued to be an administrative center and developed into an intellectual and literary one as well. In the seventh and eighth centuries, for instance, Medina became an important center for the legal discussions that would lead to the codification of Islamic law.
What is now Saudi Arabia became divided into two distinct regions. The Hijaz was variously controlled by whoever was powerful in the empire. In 1000, this was the Ismaili Fatimid dynasty, who ruled from their new capital, Cairo. In the thirteenth century, the Mamluk sultans of Egypt became the feudal overlords of the Hijaz, and in 1517 it passed to the Ottoman Empire after the Turks conquered Egypt. It also developed its cosmopolitan atmosphere due to the constant pilgrimage traffic.
The Najd, on the other hand, was more isolated and of no great importance to the imperial masters. This was chiefly due to its geographic situation; once the Muslim empire spread, pilgrims from the west soon found more convenient routes that avoided the deserts. That division can be felt to this day.
The Saudi-Wahhabi Pact
Around 1500, an obscure clan took over some date groves in Ad Diriyah, near Riyadh, and settled there. Over time the area developed into a small town, and the clan that would become the Al-Saud came to be recognized as its leaders. And there they would be tending their date palms to this day if it hadn't been for the trials and tribulations of one Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab Al-Tamimi.
Born in the Najd in 1703 or thereabouts, Abdul Wahhab became angry during his religious studies about the discrepancy between the austere rituals laid down in the Koran and the way the religion was popularly practiced, especially the worship of shrines and saints he found among the Shia he encountered in Persia. Styling himself a reformer, and determined to return Islam to the sole unchallenged worship of a single God and to fight all "innovation" from music to smoking, he spent some years destroying shrines in the Najdi towns of Huraimila and Uyainah while attempting to persuade their leaders of his ideas.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Saudi Arabia by Nicholas Buchele. Copyright © 2008 Kuperard. Excerpted by permission of Bravo Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Cover,Title Page,
Copyright,
About the Author,
Map of Saudi Arabia,
Introduction,
Key Facts,
CHAPTER 1: LAND AND PEOPLE,
• Geography,
• Climate,
• Population,
• A Brief History,
• Terrorism,
• The Political System,
• The Economy,
• A Global and Regional Power,
CHAPTER 2: VALUES AND ATTITUDES,
• Islam,
• Tribal Loyalties,
• Honor,
• Family and Privacy,
• The Position of Women,
• Attitudes Toward Foreigners,
• Restrictions on Non-Muslims,
• Education and Work,
CHAPTER 3: CUSTOMS AND RELIGIONS,
• Calendars,
• Ramadan,
• The Hajj,
• National Holidays,
• Superstition,
CHAPTER 4: MAKING FRIENDS,
• Friendship,
• Meeting Saudis,
• Greetings,
• Hospitality and Invitations,
• Life on the Compound,
• Asian Expatriates,
CHAPTER 5: PRIVATE AND FAMILY LIFE,
• Living Conditions,
• Daily Life,
• Social Gatherings,
• Young People,
CHAPTER 6: TIME OUT,
• Leisure,
• Social Space,
• Shopping for Pleasure,
• Eating Out,
• Café Culture,
• Cultural Activities,
• Picnics,
• Desert Trips,
• Sports and Exercise,
CHAPTER 7: TRAVEL, HEALTH, AND SAFETY,
• Roads and Traffic,
• Local Transportation,
• Intercity Travel,
• Accommodation,
• Health,
• Safety,
CHAPTER 8: BUSINESS BRIEFING,
• The Business Landscape,
• Saudi Time,
• The Business Culture,
• Business Etiquette,
• Meetings,
• Presentations,
• Negotiations,
• Contracts and Fulfillment,
• Women in Business,
CHAPTER 9: COMMUNICATING,
• Language,
• Manners,
• Body Language,
• Services,
• The Media,
• Conclusion,
Further Reading,