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Recently, I completed a seven-year stint as a trainer in a school belonging to a corporation in Saudi Arabia. While things ran fairly smoothly when I arrived in 1996, once the uprising began in Palestine, life went downhill until blood began to flow even where I was working. The intifada marked the turning point of our relations with the Arabs. Once the Jews and Palestinians resumed their deadly dance of death, the Gulf Arabs became further politicized against all those white faces that they assumed were in support of Israel. We foreign teachers received a fax which some dimwit actually photocopied and put into all or our mailboxes at work. In objectionable grammar and misspellings, it said we would all be killed unless we got our governments to stop their support of Israel. This did a lot to boost teacher morale.

Medina

On the streets of Al Khobar attitudes changed, or real feelings surfaced. To begin with, the Saudi Arabs in the local shops had never been too friendly. In fact, they normally ignored us, seldom said hello or gave any sign of acknowledgement of our existence.

Expats seemed to be persona non grata, a necessary evil. But now we had Saudi youngsters shouting at us “Fuck You, Fuck You” as though they were New York cabbies. Some Western women were spat upon in the local shopping mall. One of our teachers was knifed while in a gold souq downtown.

My own experience of hostility was an incident in Bahrain, the island nation that has a reputation for greater tolerance than Saudi. I was taking an early morning stroll near the Emir’s palace out in the wasteland when I heard a car pull up on the road behind me. I turned to see an SUV stopped at an angle so that the person in the back seat had a clear view of me. As I took note of three young Arabs in white thobes looking intently at me, the one in the rear seat raised a hunting rifle (the kind you’d use for deer) and pointed it dead center on me. And like a deer I froze. The words So this is how I’m going to die ran through my mind. There was nowhere for me to flee. Fortunately, a car full of potential witnesses came along. The man in the back pulled the rifle in and the car took off. Would they have shot me? I don’t know.

Relations with our fellow teachers from Arab countries changed as well. Before the intifada, we used to joke around quite a bit. But once the uprising became a daily thing on television, with Al Jazeera showing bloodied Arab children, or Israeli soldiers humiliating old men and women, our Arab colleagues became more and more taciturn. All of us felt the chill resentment rise spread between us. And no matter that we had lunch together on occasion, we Westerners were less and less often invited to break bread with Arabs in the lunch room. This uncomfortable atmosphere took a turn for the extreme as soon as September 11 hit. But, we’ll get to that in a moment....
 

Kaaba, Mecca  Kaaba, Mecca

There are all kinds of historic explanations for what brought the West in contact with the Saudis, but not much of Western rational, enlightened thinking has rubbed off on them. So, despite the modern highrises, the Safeway supermarkets, and the Mercedes Benzes cruising along the highways of Arabia, the cultural programs running in the heads of the Saudis are far from the tracks running in ours. And one should not be fooled by the occasional liberal, Western-educated Saudi. He is an anomaly, far from the rank and file of his medieval culture which is having a difficult time coming to grips with the contemporary world. During my time in Arabia, I met several well-trained, talented Saudi individuals who would do very well in a tolerant environment like the United States. But in Arabia these fellows are a tiny minority that can be crushed by extremists at any time. We were always aware of this East-West chasm in mentalities because we found it everyday in our classrooms.
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Jeddah

Let me give some examples. Some of our students came from remote mountain tribes in the South West and the far North, quite distant from Dhahran and its population that was more used to foreigners. I had one worried fellow tell me that one of his friends had come back from the USA “bewitched by the Jews.” This meant that the friend no longer fit into the tribe; he had been changed by going abroad. Another student told me that the Americans had not really landed on the moon. He knew this because images of the US flag on what was supposedly the lunar surface had moved as in a gust of wind, and everyone knew there was no wind up there. When I asked if he had ever looked at the moon through a telescope or had looked up to see the International Space Station then being assembled, he said No. Similarly, none of my students had ever looked through a microscope. Some students still would not believe the world was round. When one day I told my class there would be an eclipse of the sun the next day, many looked at me in disbelief. No one ever asked how I knew. Very few asked any questions at all.

Once I asked the class how they could deny the world was millions of years old when dinosaur bones were being found all over its surface. Their answer is typical, and it comes straight from the mosque: Allah put dinosaur bones into the Earth to test our faith. End of discussion. Many students displayed no intellectual curiosity, although they could readily memorize facts which they would never believe in. In their minds, if something didn’t come from a sheik or an imam, it had no validity. This willful ignorance disturbed me the most.

In the classroom, we had instances of students who insisted on leaving the room when we showed educational videos. This was because they had been told that music and films were diabolical. Not uncommonly, some of our students used their pens to dig out the faces of women depicted in our textbooks. Others defaced pictures of churches, Christian crosses, statues of Buddha, and images of dogs. At times, entire pages were torn out of texts. I found instances of this even in the reference section of the university library near our center. Foreign texts were routinely defaced in acts of religious zealotry.

Censorship was everywhere. At our training center, magazines like Time and News Week were scrutinized by our librarians so that all ads for alcohol were pasted over; all nudity, of course, including statues artists of the Renaissance, was covered up. In local shops, the faces of women on packaging were covered by price stickers. Some books that we teachers had ordered for the training center were withheld because they had the word “evolution” in their titles. This included books on topics like the “evolution of thought” published by Oxford University Press. Other books were banned because they dealt with Arab history, written by Western rather than by Arab scholars. At one meeting of the library’s censor committee, I was told such books would be buried. 

This doesn’t mean we had no books in the center’s library. We actually managed to accumulate a decent collection, considering the circumstances. However, only we teachers ever made use of it. The majority of our students were neither capable nor interested in reading the library’s holdings of scientific, cultural, and historic material. The only videos they watched voluntarily were those of Mr. Bean. Most of our magazine subscriptions were eventually cancelled, ostensibly because they cost too much money, but more likely because they were from the United States.

The pervasiveness of ideological control is noticeable on every block of every city in Saudi Arabia. According to the Quoran, men can pray in a clean place at home, but in Saudi they are pressured to go to the local mosques. For convenience, there is one on every block. There are mosques on the beaches, in schools, in military and police compounds, in airports, at border crossings, at gas stations, in shopping malls, in corporations, in government buildings; and there are temporary mosques in urban residential areas that are being constructed. When the call to prayer is heard, shopping malls shut down; stores, banks, businesses, and gas stations close. On the highways, it is not uncommon to see truck drivers leave their vehicles to pray by the roadside at the scheduled time for prayers. A pious nation indeed.

Religious indoctrination and group-control is all pervasive. If people are not watched by religious enforcers, the mutawa, they are watched by the nation’s secret police. This sense of being observed extends to the classroom. I was warned a couple of times to watch what I say in class lest it be “reported.” Religion, politics, and sex were not to be discussed in school, so there was little of importance to talk about. No meeting of the minds or informed discussions ever took place between expats and Saudis. Everyone just continued to pretend that everything was ok while people even in Saudi Arabia were being killed. 

Group cohesion and conformity are central to the lives of Saudis. In this, the nation’s leadership has been more successful than the Communists ever were. But, as in Communism, such demand for conformity has squashed personal initiative, creativity, self-expression, joyfulness, and any sense that the individual even matters. By way of illustration, we had a talented young man at the center who wanted to start his own magazine. The more he sought advice and support from his fellow Saudis, the more discouraged he became. He was told it would never succeed, that it went against tradition, that it might be offensive, and so on. Little wonder that he gave up. Multiply his experience several million times and you have the prevailing mood amongst young people in Saudi Arabia. They are defeated before they even get started in life.

As I am revising this, three of four terrorists are being hunted in Saudi Arabia. They slit the throats of at least six Westerners during the Oasis compound standoff in the town where I lived, Al Khobar. The Oasis is where I used to have brunch with my colleagues. The chef there, a man named Johannsen, was killed, as was one of the waiters who had his throat cut. Needless to say, I am relieved to be out of Saudi. But at the same time, life on the outside somehow lacks an edge. 

To contact Hans Click Here
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