How to Survive Jeddah→

Jeddah is fantastic for many reasons. Life is easy, it’s relatively safe, you don’t pay taxes, many people speak English if you don’t speak Arabic, and there are so many interesting people to meet. Make the most out of your stay with these tips and tricks.

Saudi Modern Art Patronage→

Sylvia Smith reports for BBC on Jeddah Art Week:

The first city-wide showing of contemporary artworks by established as well as young, unknown artists mostly from the Arabian peninsula demonstrated that Jeddah has been transformed into an important centre for contemporary art through private enterprise.

According to Mohammed Bahrawi, founder of the organization Arabian Wings and co-curator of the exhibition Limited Edition 2, the week represents the culmination of significant private sector funding that has been poured into the kingdom's arts and artists.

“This exhibition links 10 years of patronage by the Abdul Latif Jameel Community Initiatives to these fresh opportunities to nurture new talents,” he explains. “We sold 90% of the artworks within 24 hours and that is a good start on which to build a future.”

Social Media Campaign Against Jeddah Potholes→

Laura Bashraheel reports for Saudi Gazette:

A new campaign recently launched on YouTube and Twitter encourages people to post photos and locations of potholes around Jeddah, in the hopes that the municipality would take action.

Libra Productions teamed up with Infrared Studios in a new project aimed at getting authorities to fix Jeddah’s streets.

The campaign was the brainchild of Wessam Kabli and Raef Sherbini from Libra Productions. One of them had two cars damaged and spent so much money in changing tires.

“It’s something that we are dealing with every day. They came to us with the idea and we thought we could do it right,” said Thamer Farhan from the same production house.

Watch for the municipality failing to react.

Shisha Home Delivery→

Now that the ban on shisha in Jeddah has been fully implemented, some joints in Jeddah started to offer a home delivery service:

Recognizing that many of their customers have switched the venues of social gatherings to their homes, several cafes in the city have launched electronic shisha delivery services where a shisha and hot coals are delivered to customers in their homes for as little as SR30 and an additional fully-refundable SR100 deposit.

Owners have also tried other means to retain their customer base and skirt the ban including turning cafes into discreet invitation-only places or transforming them into outdoor ones.

The official spokesman of Jeddah municipality said the shisha home delivery service is “unlawful.”

Shisha Ban in Jeddah: Healthy Measures or Cultural Oppression?

Arab News:

The Jeddah mayoralty had set a grace period that ends today for cafes and restaurants in the city to stop serving shisha to costumers.

The ban will affect 238 restaurants and cafes reported to face an 80 percent drop in their revenue. These cafes would make a daily revenue of 7 to 10 thousand riyals from shisha alone.

The ban has only recently been enforced, with Riyadh and other cities having implemented this years ago. Shisha lovers now have to drive to cafes outside the city to smoke as the decision also applies to residential areas.

When the ban was first proposed a couple of years ago, the backlash from business owners and residents was very strong. This time the interior ministry seems determined to enforce it. Some people in Jeddah feel the ban is an attack on the identity and culture of this cosmopolitan city.

“Why do I revolt when I hear about banning shisha in Jeddah cafes? Is this something worth revolting for?” asked journalist Ebtihal Mubarak. “Yes, for me it is worth it.”

Brooklyn-based Mubarak sees the shisha ban as part of a “Najdification” effort by the government that has been going on for decades. In Riyadh, the Saudi capital and the heart of the central area of Najd, the ban on shisha within city limits has been in place for years.

She says while she supports “a ban on smoking in public spaces like government buildings, restaurants and parks because that is certainly a healthy thing,” she does not believe that banning shisha in specialized cafes where many Jeddah families have enjoyed it for years is due to health concerns.

“It is another attempt for another cultural oppression,” Mubarak wrote, “like when Prince Salman, as governor of Riyadh, allowed shisha only outside city limits while smoking cigarettes in public spaces was still allowed.”

Photo: Bill Gates in Jeddah

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was in Jeddah today, where he met with Makkah Governor Prince Khaled al-Faisal. The brief report carried by the official Saudi Press Agency said they discussed business and philanthropy. Last time Gates was in Jeddah, he had this memorable quote about women unemployment: “If you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get too close to the Top 10.”

‘Compelled to Make a Comparison’→

Abed Khazindar:

I LIVE in two worlds. I spend part of the year in Jeddah and a larger part in Paris. I find myself compelled to make a comparison between the quality of life in these two cities. The first thing that I notice is the difference in the environment. The word environment covers limitless things, most important of which is cleanliness — of the streets, utilities, restaurants and shops, particularly food stores. And then what is of great importance is the foods themselves, whether fruit and vegetables or cooked foods.

Um, Paris is better? ♦

Nigerian Female Pilgrims Stuck in Jeddah Airport→

It seems that the issue of Nigerian female pilgrims has not been resolved, despite previous reports that an agreement has been reached to allow them to perform Hajj without their male guardians. A Nigerian official told AFP that 171 of the women returned to Nigeria on a flight on Wednesday, but he clarified that they were not deported by the Saudi government. “They were returned based on the decision by the National Hajj Commission because the embarrassment from the Saudi authorities was becoming unbearable,” he said. ♦

New and Improved: the Saudi Spring→

“You started the Saudi Spring 82 years ago,” Prince Khaled al-Faisal, Governor of Makkah, told the audience who attended the inauguration of the private Business and Technology University in Dhahban, north of the city, Tuesday night. The statement echoes that of his brother Turki when the latter appeared on the Charlie Rose show last week and said something along the same lines. ♦

New US Consul General in Jeddah→

Arab News:

Anne Casper has assumed duties as the new Consul General at the US Consulate in Jeddah. During her first week, she is calling on a number of officials in the Western Region.

This is not the first time the US appoints a female Consul General to serve in the liberal, cosmopolitan city of Jeddah on the Red Sea. Jump from the quoted above paragraph to the very last sentence in the story to find this tidbit: “She is accompanied in Jeddah by her husband, who is a Registered Nurse.” ♦

Photo: The Green Flag In The Red Sea

Scuba diver waves the Saudi flag under the waters of the Red Sea to celebrate the National Day. (Source: SPA)

Burning Young Bridges

Painting by Corinne Martine

Summers in Jeddah are hot and humid. As the air conditioner hummed loudly to keep the temperature down in a small but brightly painted room, two women in their early twenties sat behind a simple white table with a serious look on their faces.

Amna Fatani and Refaa Sindi are two founding members of a youth group dedicated to spreading healthy debate and raise awareness among young Saudi females, or, as Fatani likes to put it, “to poke their minds, to make them think.”

During that sizzling afternoon in the first week of June, the two women interviewed five candidates who want to join the group. Dressed in a dark brown abaya and a silky headscarf that kept slipping off her hair, the olive-skinned Fatani was ready to ask some uncomfortable questions to the girls who sat across the table as Sindi took notes on her Toshiba laptop.

“We ask for example if they are bedouin or urban, not because we are racist but because we want to achieve diversity in the group,” Fatani, 24, told me about the interview process. “The group is a platform for people to express themselves and develop. We want to be inclusive.”

“We won’t shut anyone out,” said her colleague Sindi, 22, who kept pushing her rimless glasses up her nose. “Tolerance is very important to us.”

Words like debate, diversity and tolerance are relatively new items in the Saudi lexicon. Thanks to the Internet, the conservative country that has been for long dominated by a strict interpretation of Islam is slowly opening up to new ideas embraced by the new generation in the Kingdom. Sixty percent of the country’s population are under 30. In the lack of a true civil society and under heavy restrictions on free speech, this young generation of Saudis are struggling to find their voices as the world changes around them.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. But when King Abdullah came to power in 2005, many people hoped that the new King, widely known to be a reformist, would spearhead a new era of openness. Seven years later, most of those people seem dejected and disappointed. While some reforms have been implement, they left much, much more to be desired.

Human Rights Watch released a report last September assessing the first five years of King Abdullah’s rein. The report found that “reform has manifested itself chiefly in greater tolerance for diverse opinions and an expanded public role for women, but that royal initiatives have been largely symbolic, with only modest concrete gains or institutional protection for rights.”

One of the areas where reform lagged is civil society development. The Shoura Council, a consultative body whose members are appointed by the King and that serves as a quasi-parliament, discussed in 2006 a proposal to allow and regulate civil society organizations. It took the Council more than 18 months to okay the proposal. On January 6, 2008, the proposal was sent to the Cabinet to get the final approval before implementation.

The approval never came. Almost five years later, the civil society law is still held by the Cabinet for unknown reasons.

Abdulrahman al-Enad, a member of the Shoura Council, told local media earlier this month he is “hopeful” that the law would be approved soon.

In the lack of a legal framework, many youth groups that were born in the aftermath of the Jeddah floods in 2009 operate in a grey area with a constant fear that the government could crack down on their activities at any time. Without proper licensing, they cannot raise money, organize events or have a space to hold their meetings. Instead, they use private homes or coffee shops to meet.

A favorite spot for youth activists to meet was a café called Jusoor, or Bridges. Located in the district of Hamra in Jeddah, the place was frequented by many young men and women who found in it an oasis to meet, work, play and debate their issues.

Hamza Kashgari was a regular at Jusoor. The skinny 23-year-old was an aspiring poet who wrote a column for al-Bilad newspaper. In February 2012, he published three tweets about an imagined meeting with Prophet Mohammed. His tweets caused a huge controversy as many considered it blasphemy. Religious conservatives in the country called for Kashgari to be tried for apostasy, a charge that, if convicted, could lead to a death sentence.

Kashgari apologized and deleted the tweets, but that did not calm the storm. The King reportedly issued an order to arrest him. On February 7, He fled to Malaysia on his way to New Zealand where he said he wanted to apply for political asylum. But the Malaysian government arrested Kashgari and deported him to Saudi Arabia, despite objections from international and Malaysian human rights organizations. He remains in jail to this day, without a trial.

“It was a shock,” said Abdul-Mohsen Bellini, 25, who worked as the coordinator for cultural programming at Jusoor. He said that what Kashgari said on Twitter was “nothing” compared to what he would usually say to provoke his friends intellectually.

“We did not expect this reaction. We did not expect it at all,” he told me as he fixed a red scarf that he wrapped loosely around his neck.

Religious conservatives continued to mobilize even after Kashgari’s arrest. A group of clerics released a statement on March 14 acalling on the government to crack down on places like Jusoor where the youth meet to talk about culture, arts and politics. They described such places as “incubators of atheism.”

On May 7, 2012, the authorities shuttered Jusoor.

The closure of Jusoor left those young men and women who spent long hours there with a tremendous feeling of loss. They said they felt ”orphaned” when they realized that the place which gave them a sense of belonging together no longer exists.

The conservative-led campaign that followed Kashgari’s arrest has sent waves of fear among the youth community in Jeddah, but several people who knew him told me what happened won’t deter them from continuing to… simply be themselves.

“It’s okay,” said Renad Amjad, 22, a law student who knew Kashgari and who still has his name on the lower left corner of her Twitter avatar. “We get a little frustrated, but we quickly get up and rise again.”

“Ten years from now, Hamza will be a hero.”

Photo by @nakaR

Real Civilized Protests

Speaking of civilized Saudi protests against the anti-Islam film and cartoons, I found two good examples:

In Qatif, where anti-government protests led to several deaths over the past few months, demonstrators rallied Thursday night in the name of defending Islam and Prophet Mohammed’s honor.

Fans of the Jeddah-based al-Ittihad football club chant a famous Islamic song (or nasheed) before their AFC Champions League match against Chinese side Guangzhou Evergrande on Wednesday. (via Ebtihal Mubarak)