TRIBAL ISLAM WATCH V
[Note: light blogging today, as I finish an article for Harper's on Shia religious imagery.]
You can call this Democracy 101, but we are hoping it will lead to Democracy 106.
-- Saudi Arabian voter Ibrahim al-Nassar
(Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times)
As you know by now, yesterday, Our Friends the Saudis staged their first-ever democratic elections. Well, not quite their first: apparently, in 1925, King Abdel Aziz established a 12-member elected council in Mecca which lasted about a decade. Hardly the irresistible march of democracy across the Hadj. Thursday's experiment in democracy was a little more far-ranging: male voters chose 127 men for 37 municipal councils in the Saudi capital of Riyadh; male voters will also choose in March and April 592 other men for 178 similar posts across the country. Women, of course, are not invited.
How transformative will these elections prove for the desert kingdom? Democracy is only as effective as the culture in which it takes place--and to give you an idea about Saudi society, and especially its treatment of women, I offer an excerpt of a letter from the Arab News:
A colleague narrated an incident witnessed by his wife, who is a doctor employed in a hospital. He said, “A citizen came to her clinic accompanied by his sick teenage daughter. My wife wanted to ask the girl about her health problem, but was surprised that whenever she asked her a question her father replied on her behalf, as if it was the father who was ill, not the daughter.”
By her father’s strange action, the sick girl was turned into a guest of honor.
He said, and this is what is strange, “Before the departure of the father and his daughter my wife wanted to encourage the girl and raise her morale, as she was ill. She told her, ‘You should take good care of yourself and study well so that some day you will become a doctor like me’.”
My colleague said that his wife was surprised that it was again the father who replied on behalf of his daughter. But his reply was stranger still. He burst into a rage, “What are you saying? This profession is not for us. It’s a shame to allow our daughters to work as doctors. Do you want my daughter to work in this dirty profession?”
I have a conviction that this man and those of his kind cannot change their calcified thinking even if we open a center for dialogue or a satellite channel in his courtyard.
The writer underscores an interesting point. The word "dialogue" is always used--especially in the Arab world--by leaders who wish to delay or prevent practical social change in their countries with an obfuscating screen of promises, declarations and pronouncements. In light of this, it is amusing to read Saudi official Basheer al-Gorayedh's comment in yesterday's Financial Times about US. attitudes toward OFTS:
We feel that even on an official level they don't seem to understand our perspective on things after this long friendship. There needs to be a serious dialogue between us.
On the contrary, perhaps we understand you all too well. And the time for "dialogue" passed at exactly 8:48 on the morning of September 11, 2001.