Sex and the Saudi

The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said: “If a time comes when my community is afraid to call a tyrant a tyrant, then it is no longer worth belonging to my community anymore.” (Ibn Hanbal; Al-Suyuti).

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In general, those who embrace a racist and ethnocentric view of the world do not bother with the particulars of those they consider to be beneath them, something that causes considerable difficulty for a few choice Saudi characters. You see, certain Saudi men hire servants as cheap labor, frequently picking them up from diverse regions of the Subcontinent: Rajasthan, Punjab, Bengal, the Northwest Frontier and so on.

Their Saudi disinclination to matters academic of course means that none of these regions can be distinguished from the other; thus, when a Saudi beats his Bengali employee, he expects the same passivity and silence from his other employees—most employees, after all, will not strike back at their employer when he and his family are entirely dependent on the employer’s goodwill.

So smile at the Saudi man who, as I later learned from a friend residing in the Kingdom, decided to strike his proud Pathan porter, with his walking stick, in the middle of the airport—in response to which the porter began operating on his master with said walking stick, finally stopped by several dozen police, who only together would dare take down the noble Afghan.

It was the first time a Saudi man was recorded as having sympathized with the Soviets in the wake of Afghanistan, but regardless, it did him well. I was proud to learn that this was also the case with the Punjabi and other martial races, eager as we are to live up to departed England’s estimation of us. Nothing matters more to a Pakistani or Indian than a white man’s approval, even well after he’s gone and entirely indifferent.

But this doesn’t explain why a few Saudis so deeply despise Indians and Pakistanis. That always boggled my mind. What I’m trying to say is, if you’re from Norway and never paid attention to the Islamic world, it would be hard for you to tell a Pakistani from an Indian, or even a Saudi from a Pakistani. All of them are commonly brown, and most (except Punjabis, like me) are pretty short. This provided added amusement, free of charge: I towered over Saudi Arabia’s policemen, leaving them in the odd position of looking down on me when in fact they were looking up to me. Then again, everything is backwards in Saudi Arabia. In that way, it is like an American high school. One of Saudi Arabia’s late, leading scholars actually came up with a fatwa (an Islamic, non-binding legal opinion) that the world was flat.

But on driving some distance through Saudi Arabia, I could see how you might make that kind of mistake (With the added condition that, being a moron, you have never looked at a globe and considered why it is round, instead of say being triangular or trapezoidal). The dominant features of the Saudi landscape call flatness to mind, the theme undoubtedly repetition. Not in a negative way, though: The land is enchanting, dare I say romantic, what with such stark and hostile sands, blasted by an endless blue sky and a withering sun, shining without pause. Traveling in Saudi Arabia induces spirituality— monotheism inspires the driver, if even against his will. And I say “his” because women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia. Other than the right to own property, women also enjoy disproportionate discrimination under the . . . well, law, I guess. The hardliners, who have a stranglehold on the country, do their utmost to keep women out of sight. The royal family, ever mindful of its rear, is more than happy to go along. But not letting women drive has created a crisis for Saudi men, who didn’t quite get the power trip they thought they should have from such an exclusive decree.

Imagine you are a Saudi man, tired from a day of beating your Bengali worker. You come home expecting a warm dinner of whatever it is Saudis eat: I don’t know, because nobody ever bothered to invite us over to find out. But when you get home, your wife presents you not with dinner but a grocery list, asking that you either go get the food so that she can start cooking, or drive her to the store and wait (more correctly, bake, like the food she’s eventually going to prepare) in the car as she purchases the necessary ingredients, a long while that can only be relieved by your air conditioner, pumping CFCs into the atmosphere. Rainforests across the central belt of Africa, the Amazon and Southeast Asia die because of Saudi Arabia’s continued adherence to this oddball law, but despite such perverse and debilitating results, it continues to be considered Islamic. That you, the husband, have now become a chauffeur is no doubt a blow to your pride, an insult for which some poor south Indian employee will surely have to pay.

Now consider also that the Saudi man is quite proud of his possession of a male organ, which allows him to father countless children, among them certainly daughters—all of whom also cannot drive. Girls are married at alarmingly young ages in Saudi Arabia simply because their fathers are sick of driving them around: they just dump them on some other poor fool, who will then commence a lifetime of chauffeuring responsibilities. Not to mention that many Saudi men have multiple wives, and thus even more daughters—the headache increases exponentially. By the time the Saudi man finally gets home again, it is tomorrow, he’s half starved to death, dinner still isn’t done, and he’ll certainly be late to work, and people think the oil money makes them lazy! Far from it. The poor man’s driving time could take him to Sirius and back, or some other place the clerics are quite sure doesn’t exist, because the earth is flat. No wonder these guys fly themselves into buildings: It’s all they know how to do. That one time, they just had more unwilling passengers traveling with them.

Of course, there is a basis for this prohibition, however strange it might initially seem. Saudi scholars argue that women cannot drive because it is dangerous for Islam (that is, the guy’s Islam). In their conception of the West, driving is the root of all evil, as they imagine that each time a Western woman steps into her car, it is to indulge in illicit sex. As much as any Western man would wish this true, it is not. But in an excellent example of a self-fulfilling prophecy, preventing women from driving eventually demands that workers be brought in to drive the women around, and by law, these workers must be men, who of course must serve as cheap labor, and therefore cannot be native folk. When the wife’s pregnancy produces a child that is half-Filipino, certainly someone’s masculinity is in serious question. The Filipino is already in the car, though, and halfway to the desert, where he’ll simply fry to death, leaving the poor desi to more of his brutal fate. Like all Saudi solutions (at least those offered by the government), this one has clearly backfired, offering no benefit and causing much more harm. These Saudis don’t shoot themselves in the foot as much as they wrap sticks of dynamite around their asses and fart amongst oilfields, all the while basking in the fissile luminosity of a merciless sun. When ever shall they learn?