Jul 2, 2009

Winds of Change

Qusay Culture, Personal, Tourism 8 Comments

I left Jeddah in 1992, and haven’t been back to live there since then (other than weekends and vacations). As an insider living out of it, I saw things coming. Bad things, which I used to tell my family and friends would happen, I never knew what they were, I just knew… I had these feelings, and they happened. The bombings, the militant Islamist, the rise of the extremist. It could’ve just been part of my broadening awareness which is part of growing up, I’ll never know… but I know I felt what I felt at the time.

I am not trying to prophesies anything, as I am not Nostradamus. However, I would like to share my outlook for the Saudi future in this post.

I’ve received an email from a friend telling me that Saud Aramco will be taking the job of planning, designing, and constructing the new King Abdullah Sports City in Jeddah. Aside from why is an oil company taking over construction projects, as it did with the King Abdullah University is beyond me, but I believe that it has to do with accountability for money spending that might not be available in other construction companies in the region (in other words money said to be spent somewhere but it actually goes into personal pockets for personal gain). As SaudiOger and SBG are the other big companies that might have been tasked with that project. I know SBG was subcontracted along with others to do a lot of the work in the now almost complete KAUST (which I hope to write another post about).

Now this would be another ambitious project which holds King Abdullah’s name, and this is why I am optimistic about the future. These projects are not short term, we have not seen development in this size and magnitude in any era in the Arabian peninsula throughout the known history, even the second Islamic empire (the Umayyad dynasty) couldn’t wait to get out of the area and set up its base in Damascus, and yes every Saudi King, and every well off prince and every Saudi rich man has a few palaces/villas/chateaus/little apartments out in the nicer parts of the world. And even those that can afford a little, have apartments in Egypt or Syria or Lebanon. Yet very few people have put anything back into this land, even with the luxurious palaces of all the dynasties that controlled the two holy mosques of Makkah and Madinah, one just has to look at old pictures of the holy places from fifty years ago to know that they were not really taken care of compared to other grand Mosques around the world.

Change in coming, change is happening, as slow as it might seem to us, it does not seem slow to our parent’s generation.

Once oil was discovered in the region, our nation was like a bodybuilder on steroids, all big from the outside but our internal organs get messed up, our kidneys and liver were exhausted and our hearts enlarged. We grew so fast like chickens on hormones, they say if you enter a chicken house where chickens were given hormones to grow and clapped your hands, they will have a heart attack and die. Since the discovery of oil, our culture has been forced to do the splits with one foot stuck in the past and the other trying to plant itself in the future, but the future does not wait and we are forced to stretch more and more.

This has caused the Dissociative identity disorder that our people and culture are/have been going through, we want to be true to our roots yet be modern… and that my dear readers… is another topic all together.