Getting it Done, Saudi Style

I had forgotten that the world is completely nocturnal during Ramadan. I was trying desperately to get in touch with my travel agent concerning tickets out of here (home! home!) and I called at 2:30, and I called at 5, and each time I got a message saying it was prayer time and they would be back soon. Now I can say with certainty that it was not prayer time either of those times. Luckily, I happened to talk to someone well-informed, and they reminded me that everything is closed during the day. The travel agents didn't even open until 9:30pm. It reminds me of what I was told when I commented on how late the weddings are here (dinner typically isn't served until 4 or 5am). A woman told me that it doesn't make sense to have the weddings during the day when prayers are going to get in the way every two or three hours. Instead, they start things after late prayer at 8:30 or so, and go on from there, because they have a good 8-hour period of no prayer. It's interesting to think that even social life is scheduled with prayers in mind.

Anyway, things continue to move along. I need to start my Arabic homework, because there's a whole lot of it to do, and it'd always be helpful to recite some Arabic vocabulary and try to learn it. I do enjoy the Arabic homework though because most of it is like a puzzle. Once I figure out what it says it's actually fairly easy stuff, and I suspect the other girls are spending about 10 minutes on it, but decoding it and eventually making sense of it is a challenge I quite enjoy. Of course, it's awfully irritating when I can't figure out what it says. But we'll pretend that never happens.

And I've come to an excellent arrangement with the really spectacular TA for my Translation class - I will go to her a day before class and get the translation so I can work on it at home and get extra time and practice, and then after class she will give me a photocopy of her version of the translation so that I can check mine over again for errors. Things are looking up! I wrote a sentence using عمّا today and I am very proud of myself. For those of you who don't recognize this fabulous news for what it is, let me just say that عمّا is a contraction of عن ما and means, roughly, "about what" and that, for people who aren't entirely sure how to use conjunctions and prepositions and that sort of thing, it seems awfully complicated. But I used it, and I used it correctly! I am an Arabic genius!

At least I enjoy the language bit. If I didn't this would be a real drag.

In other interesting news, I finally finished the book I borrowed from the library and have started another one. I figure since the library doesn't have too many books, I'll work through as many of them as I can before I leave. It seems ike much more of a manageable task than trying to tackle the Yale library in all of its glory. Anyway, the one I just finished is called Beyond the Veil by Dr. Seymour Grey, a physician who worked at one of the same hospitals as my father, but a decade earlier. He came to Riyadh when things were just getting started, when the building boom was in its inception, and before Saudi Arabia became a home to a huge number of Western ex-pats. However, his story parallels my father's in many ways, and I picked up the book because my dad keeps talking about maybe wanting to write a book one of these days.

Dr. Grey really romanticizes things. I'm not sure if he made things that way in order to be more interesting to the reader, or if that's really his perception of events, or if perhaps things were, in fact, much more romantic 30 years ago. I think it does a disservice to this place to continue to treat it like some hidden place beyond time, but I can understand the impulse to do exactly that. It certainly makes it easier to accept how different everything is if you assume it is a kind of alternate universe. And really, in a place where Western values are clearly not the traditional values, can you really try to apply those values?

Are any values really universal?

There's a website, Dhimmi Watch, I've been meaning to bring up... and now seems like the time. I disagree with the premise of the website, which is that Muslims are incapable of seeing non-Muslims as equal or worthy of their consideration. But it is interesting to note the continuing effects of Muslim values upon the rest of the world. It only makes sense that as the population of Muslims in Europe and America increases so will their influence on society, but how much will that undermine the traditional values of freedom etc is unclear. Certainly it's an interesting thing to watch, and this website does a good job of documenting one side of the story. Today's installment mentions British clergymen suggesting an apology on behalf of the British for colonizing Muslim lands. Certainly an interesting idea, although I doubt it would do any good at this point.

I wish I could talk to my intro anthropology professor, he would probably have some interesting things to say about all of this. I've been struggling with cultural relativism for a long time. I can't decide how competing values can be fit into a single system, but I have to hope they can.

Enough for now. Back to Arabic.