If I travelled on the back of a camel, then perhaps the camel would have said what al-Muthaqqaf al-Abdi attributed to his own camel [as having said that he spent all his life travelling and roving ...]. However, I usually travel by plane, and in two weeks I travelled from London to New York and Beirut, and then London again and Paris (this alone was a private visit), and Jeddah and Riyadh then Beirut again, before returning to London, and then to Cairo a few days later. Some scenes that I have come accross: I read the Saudi newspapers en route to Jeddah, and stopped at a witty article written by my friend Turki al-Dukhail in the Al-Watan newspaper. The article was about a Saudi academic who requested that a special hospital ward be set up for Roqia [Islamic exorcism], where the injured by means of envy may be admitted, as Turki says, to the Roqia ward where a Sheikh can treat the injury by the [exorcism technique] of Nafth [blowing with saliva]. The witty article then satires the Roqia and other quackery satellite channels; I have nothing more to add here except that prayers only work in conjunction with medical treatment, and are not an alternative to it, and we have been taught: “Trust in God but tether your camel”. - After that, I read another witty article published in the Saudi edition of our newspaper Al-Hayat, and which I have not come across in the international edition, or which I may have missed. In the article, Suzan Mashhadi wrote about a woman who asked for divorce after she found out that the name her husband saved her number under on his mobile phone was “Guantanamo”, the infamous detention camp. The writer said that looking at the wives' contact names in their husband's mobile phones will show many strange names, such as “Said the Indian”, “a thorn in the throat”, and “the mistake of my life”. It never occurred to me to give my wife a nickname on my mobile phone, and if I ever do that it would be “the queen of ladies”...Coward, I know, but cowards do survive. - I discovered that Riyadh competes with Cairo in traffic; while traffic jams usually occur for a few hours in time for rush hours and school hours, the traffic jams in both capitals lasts 24 hours in fact. I ask the motorists who were driving at 4 in the morning, where were they? Or where are they going to and with whom? Is her name “the wrath of God” on the mobile phone or is it “the light of the eye”? I also want to ask them, are they not afraid of both the Ministries of Interior, the government's and the one at home? Perhaps it's best if I don't ask so that no one would ask me what I was doing at 4 in the morning when I was stuck in the traffic jam. - In Riyadh and Jeddah, I have not seen any signs of the global financial crisis, or its local equivalent. Perhaps then that the reason behind this is that we lag behind the rest of the world, and the crisis will arrive later to our region on foot, or maybe on the back of the camel that I began my article with, ten years later. What I noticed was that the number of veiled women has increased a great deal; I will not go into this debate again, but I just want to say here that some of them not only contented themselves with covering their entire bodies with the Niqab, but also wore dark glasses, or placed a black scarf over their faces, without any opening for their eyes. I hope that the sight of the external world engulfed in blackness will not affect the state of mind of veiled women, or prevent them from reading the opinions expressed by Sheikh al-Azhar, the Mufti of Egypt and the Minister of Endowments about the Niqab. - I arrived in Riyadh coming from Jeddah, and found out that Prince Khaled bin Sultan is fighting in the South, following the Huthi cross-border aggression. I will leave politics for another day, but want to say today that I cannot fathom that Al-Hayat's publisher, the assistant minister of defence, would start a war just to avoid a game of backgammon with me and to avoid the results of playing with a professional expert player. Riyadh is in fact full of friends. For instance, I ran into the Minister of Culture and Information Dr. Abdul Aziz Khoja; while I had preferred to talk with him about poetry and culture, we delved into the Huthis' issue, as I did with my friend Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Said, the advisor at the Royal Court, and our brother brigadier Ayed al-Juaid, the chairman of the board of our institution. - I never visit Riyadh without meeting my friends from the Saneh family; they are a rare breed, as the four brothers are three surgeons and one dentist, and the two sisters Raja and Rasha are both dentists, and on top of everything their mother Um Nasser is a distinguished friend of my family. I found out there that Raja, the author of “Girls of Riyadh”, is in the United States pursuing her specialization in dentistry; her absence was compensated by the fact that I discovered that Dr. Rasha has a talent I have not known of before, in making chocolate. She is even thinking about opening a chocolate shop in Riyadh along with her job as a dentist. In other words, this means that Rasha will spoil people's teeth with chocolate, and then treat the same teeth, thus diversifying her income sources, earning money back and forth. - I saw the Lebanese congratulating each other for the formation of the Lebanese cabinet, after having waited for so long. I asked about the names in the cabinet, and my colleagues who are better informed about what's undeclared told me that the new government includes high calibre ministers in both professionalism and ethics. However, they said that it also included three or four “mischievous” ministers who will be a nuisance to our brother Saad Hariri. All I can do here is to pray him wellness, which is a prize these days. What's better than this and that is that I found the young men and women working in Al-Hayat to be immersed in a new endeavour centred on “the basics of the written press for the Palestinian youth in Lebanon”. This latter is in fact a project launched by Dar al Hayat, and is founded by the British Embassy in Beirut. It includes workshops that provide the participants with the know-how and skills to express their views objectively. I visited one of the sessions and was quite impressed with what I heard and saw. This is a good effort that that Al-Hayat and the British Embassy both deserve credit for. [email protected]
