Category Asides

Women’s driving, woman ambassador, a pretty happy girl

  • Elaph quotes unnamed sources saying Saudi women will start driving their cars within two months. Watany mobile news service also quoted unnamed sources saying a meeting took place last week between a senior decision-maker and the Grand Mufti indicates that women’s driving is imminent. Also last week, al-Riyadh daily published a feature discussing how to implement women’s driving, which marks a transition from the typical “is it time for women to start driving or not?” Last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the minister of foreign affairs, told NYT columnist Maureen Dowd to bring her driving license next time she visits the country. However, Dowd told me in an email that she knows he was being sly and that driving is not going to be forthcoming.
  • Abdullah Aboul-Samh praises the Republic of Georgia for appointing a woman ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “It is a clear evidence on our civic advancement,” he adds. I’m sorry dude, but Georgia appointing a woman ambassador says nothing about us. Please wake me up when Saudi Arabia appoints a woman ambassador in Georgia.
  • Sabria S. Jawhar: “Like all Saudi women I appreciate the efforts by American and European human rights organizations to protect us from bad Saudi men and to help grant us the freedom we deserve. Without the help of Americans and Europeans my life would have no future. Okay, I’m lying. If Western do-gooders minded their own business I’d be a pretty happy girl.”

KSA Goes Nuclear and Renewable

The state news agency says:

The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud issued today a royal order establishing “King Abdullah City for Nuclear and Renewable Energy” in accordance with its law. Former minister of commerce and Harvard-trained physicist Hashim Yamani will head the new organization.

I always believed that Saudi Arabia, as the world’s top oil exporter, should invest part of the wealth generated by its vast but finite natural resources to deal with the reality of living in the post-oil era. This is a step in the right direction.

More child marriages, Saudi nurses quit, SG fluff

  • Why my heart hurts and my stomach is turned, too.

    In Riyadh Newspaper today there was a report on a 65 year old man who suffers from Hepatitis B applying for a marriage health certificate to marry an eleven year old girl. The staff at the hospital were shocked not only by the shamelessness of the man but also of the eagerness of the girl’s parents to finish up the paperwork so they can go ahead with the wedding. So they are knowingly subjecting their daughter to not only a pedophile but also a disease.

    Some of the hospital staff apparently strongly disagree with the procedure and want to prevent the marriage but they have no power to. Marriage licenses are granted to hepatitis sufferers only after the healthy partner is aware and agrees but how can you expect adult consent and awareness from an 11 year old?!

    Sickening.

  • Half of Saudi women who enter the nursing profession quit their jobs because a) they don’t understand what it takes to be a nurse, and b) the social stigma and lack of family support. I have a cousin who wanted to become a nurse but her parent didn’t let her because of this reason.
  • Some people accuse me of being too negative, that I focus too much on everything that is wrong with this country and never write about the good things here. But the truth is, you don’t really need me to do that. Why do need to do that when Saudi Gazette runs stuff like this?

MOE hiring process, al-Nujaimi mingling saga

  • The Ministry of Education (MOE) is hiring. Out of the 34,000 people who applied for teaching jobs, only 21,000 managed to score more than 50% in the Qiyas test aka the Saudi SAT. Today, those 21,000 candidates were interviewed by MOE in order to “inspect their ideological tendencies.” What MOE means by the words between quote marks is actually this: make sure those teachers-to-be are not extremists who will spread their poison in schools and produce future terrorists. Sounds like a good idea, right? Not really. I mean, can’t those extremists conceal their extremism for a brief interview just to get the job? Can’t they pretend to be tree-hugging, peace-loving, dialogue-embracing, upstanding citizens for the duration of a short encounter with their potential employers?
  • Shiekh Mohammed al-Nujaimi, who once described segregation as one of the fundamentals on which the Saudi state was built and then took a U-turn after al-Shethri fiasco, was recently rumored to be mingling big time with unrelated women during a conference in Kuwait. Interestingly (or maybe not) al-Nujaimi has praised the infamous al-Barrak’s fatwa in which he called for opponents of the kingdom’s strict segregation of men and women to be put to death if they refuse to abandon their ideas. After pictures and videos of his mingling made their way to the web, he first denied what the pictures and videos suggested, and said some of them were photoshopped, which is something the organizers of the event considered so insulting that they threatened to sue him.


    Today, al-Nujaimi finally admitted that he mingled, but he said he did it for all the right reasons: to prevent vice and help those misguided women find the righteous path. This should go well with those women, I guess.

The View of Arab TV, i.zone advertorial in Arab News

  • Why most of women talk shows on Arab TV channels have four hosts? Amal Zahid jokingly says, probably because they accept the notion that one woman is not enough for a man. The reason, of course, is because most of these talk shows are modeled after The View. But I agree with Zahid that my friend Buthaina al-Nassr is more than capable of hosting her own show instead of sharing the table with three other women on Al Hurra. She has already done it with Al Ekhbariya, and I’m sure she can do it again.
  • Dear Arab News, I like you guys, but shame on you for publishing this piece without telling your readers that it is an ad. Seriously, shame on you.

Noura al-Faiz cut out, Op-Ed writers do interviews

  • So Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, the minister of education, had a meeting with teachers. Present at the meeting were senior officials at the ministry, including Noura al-Faiz. At the end of the meeting, photos were taken. Few days later, the PR department at the ministry published special print materials to mark the occasion. However, there was something wrong with the the cover photo: Noura al-Faiz has been cut out! Prince Faisal said he was unhappy that this happened.
  • Ashraf al-Fagih thinks it is so strange that an op-ed writer like him would do an interview. The writer in question is his fellow columnist in al-Watan daily Mahmoud Sabbagh, who prepared the questions for an interview with an STC executive that was published two weeks ago. I agree with most of what Ashraf says. Most Saudi journalists are unprofessional and lack basic skills. However, I don’t think that opinion writers are exempt from doing journalistic tasks like conducting research and doing interviews. Actually, I believe this must be at the heart of their writing.

Earth Hour in KSA, Musk Lake renamed

  • Saudi Arabia will observe Earth Hour tomorrow for the first time, but Khalaf al-Harbi says he won’t be joining everybody else for this event. Why? Because the Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) has already forced him to observe it more than three times this week in three different districts in Riyadh and at different times of the day and night. Can you blame him?
  • The government is apparently unhappy about the sarcastic name Jeddawis have given to the Musk Lake. The Ministry of Culture and Information (MOCI) has sent a directive to local newspapers and magazines asking them to stop using the infamous name and use the long and boring “Water Sanitation Lake in Jeddah” instead. I understand what the government is trying to do, but I don’t think they can force the people and the media to use the new name. Of course the government are free to, and should, use it in their communications, but for the rest of us I think the Musk Lake name is here to stay, at least for a few more years.
  • What the beautifying committee of Khafji needs is a better translator: