Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Even the once feeble local media has been shaken up by this incursion into Saudi living
rooms.
King Abdullah himself was forced to intervene in October 2009 when a female Saudi
journalist was ordered by Saudi courts to be flogged for organising a TV program on
which a Saudi man described his active sex life. The broadcasting Lebanese channel had
its licence revoked and offices in Riyadh and Jeddah closed, but it seems that very few
Saudis actually turned the TV off. This almost two-faced attitude towards Western culture
has been tempered by the growth of explicitly Arab language mass media like Al-Jazeera,
often based in the Gulf States or Lebanon.
These Arab media organisations make it considerably harder for conservative factions
within Saudi to simply condemn TV as un-Islamic and this has also contributed to the
massive growth in the numbers of Saudis online. Internet censors are playing catch-up
with an increasingly sophisticated Saudi youth who channel their internet via third party
servers based in the Gulf and avoid official censorship. This exposure is fundamentally
transforming Saudi culture but in ways that are hard to measure.
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Arts
Literature
Bedouin poetry and storytelling are part of a rich oral tradition with desert and Islamic le-
gends, often in poetic form, at their heart. However, little has been committed to written
form and even less translated into
English.
Novelists who chronicle the impact of oil money and modernisation on a deeply tradi-
tional desert kingdom include Hamza Bogary, Ahmed Abodehman and Abdelrahman
Munif; the latter's citizenship was revoked and his books, thinly veiled parables of Saudi
Arabia, banned in the Kingdom. The impact of rapid modernisation upon Bedouin society
is beautifully portrayed in his novel
Cities of Salt
. Hamid al-Damanhuri's
Thaman al-
Tadhiyah
(The Price of Sacrifice) and
Wa-Marrat al-Ayyam
(And the Days Went By) are
two novels available in English.
Although almost a decade ago, one 2005 firestorm of literary controversy still reson-
ates.
Girls of Riyadh
was the first novel by a young Saudi woman, Rajaa Alsanea, describ-
ing the intertwining lives of four young Saudi women, friends since school days. The
