BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2022.2041400 ‘And never the twain shall meet’? The Western other in the Saudi novel and the contrastive construction of Saudi identity Elad Giladi Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Q1 University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel 5 ABSTRACT This article examines the issue of the ‘other’ in the Saudi novel from the 1980s to 2000 against the background of the social changes taking place in Saudi Arabia. It is based on the reading of some thirty Saudi novels and offers a critical analysis of selected novels, based on the assumption that fictional-literary texts can serve as a valuable source for the understanding of various social processes. My main contention is that at the beginning of the period, the discourse towards the Western ‘other’ was very dichotomous and stereotypical, but over time changes in discourse could be identified that indicate developments in the perception of the ‘self’ versus the ‘other’ that reflected a dynamic dialogue between Saudi society and Western society. Later novels presented a more complex and genuine picture of East-West relations, and even served as a platform for internal criticism. 10 15 20 Introduction Historical, social, economic, religious, and political factors led to the strengthening of conservative trends in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. However, various events and processes that took place in the 1990s led to a certain loosening of zealous and rigid approaches and created different groups that introduced new concepts and contents of defiance towards the government into the Saudi discourse. The great changes that the Saudi Kingdom and society underwent during this period encouraged the writing of novels that dealt honestly with charged social issues, and those, in turn, helped to create an open and daring cultural discourse. In recent years, mainly in the wake of 9/11, many prominent studies have focused on Saudi Arabia. However, most of them have not paid sufficient attention to socio-cultural aspects and have not made use of Saudi novels.1 Q2 CONTACT Elad Giladi 1 elad.giladi@mail.huji.ac.il University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Noteworthy exceptions are Madawi al-Rasheed’s A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), that includes two chapters on novels by Saudi women of the 1990s and 2000s, accompanied by interviews with the authors, and works by Zahia Smail Salhi. See: Zahia Smail Salhi and Abdullah Alfauzan, ‘Withstanding the Winds of Change? Literary Representations of the Guld War and its Impacts on Saudi Society,’ Arab Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2017): 973–995; Zahia Smail Salhi and Ibrahim A. I. Alfraih, ‘Blurring the Boundaries of History and Fiction: Re-imagining the Past and Re-defining the Present through the Lens of Saudi Women Novelists,’ in Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective, eds. Susan Hodgett and Patrick James (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018) 99–113. © 2022 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Elad Giladi, Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel 25 30 2 E. GILADI In a 2003 article, Marilyn Booth pointed out that historians of the Middle East do not make proper use of literary tools: ‘Thus far, though, creative use of the novel— and of poetry—as social institutions that shape human understandings of relationships and of difference has not drawn historians of the Middle East [. . .] There remains a distinct division in Middle East area studies between the study of history and the study of literature’.2 Despite Booth’s remarks, in recent years quite a few studies have appeared that use novels to examine different aspects in various arenas of the Middle East.3 When it comes to Saudi Arabia, academic research has focused mainly on history, politics, economics, security, and Islamism. Saudi Arabia’s transformation into an economic giant in the Age of Oil explains the abundance of Western sources on oil and economic issues as well as on geopolitical and geo-strategic issues that examine the Gulf arena and Saudi Arabia’s location within it. In contrast, research discussing the socio-cultural history of Saudi Arabia is relatively scanty. It is possible that the Saudi reluctance to expose itself to the Western research gaze, and which made it difficult for Western scholars and journalists (especially male ones) to access the Kingdom has contributed to the lack of discussion of its sociocultural issues. Disciplinarily speaking, the Saudi novel is mostly researched within literature. Some of the studies about it deal with the development of the Saudi novel from its inception, in the 1930s, but most of them stop in the late 1980s or early 1990s.4 A few important studies continue the research on the development of the Saudi novel into the first decade of the twenty-first century.5 The development of the Saudi novel and the marked increase in output have led to many studies about it in recent years. These studies have also been written within the disciplinary framework of literature and focus on literary aspects, but in a few of them some reference is made to the development of various aspects of the Saudi novel against the background of 2 Marilyn Booth, ‘New Directions in Middle East Women’s and Gender History,’ Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 1 (2003), http://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2003.0006 (accessed 28 March 2019). 3 For example, see: Hoda Elsadda, Gender, Nation, and the Arabic Novel: Egypt, 1892–2008 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Daphne Grace, The Woman in the Muslim Mask: Veiling and Identity in Postcolonial Literature (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Mervat Hatem, Literature, Gender and Nation-Building in NineteenthCentury Egypt: The Life and Works of ‘Aisha Taymur (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Elizabeth Holt, “Narrative and the Reading Public in 1870s” Beirut,’ Journal of Arabic Literature 40 (2009): 37–70; Magda alNowaihi, ‘The ‘Middle East’? Or . . . / Arabic Literature and the Postcolonial Predicament,” in Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 282–303; Wen-chin Ouyang, Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Samah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Stephen Sheehi, Foundations of Modern Arab Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Muhammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel: Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction (London: Routledge, 2007); Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi, Gendering Culture in Greater Syria (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015); Ronen Zeidel, ‘The Iraqi Novel and the Christians of Iraq,’ Journal of Levantine Studies 4, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 113–41. 4 Muhammad Dib, Fann al-Riwaya fi al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya al-Saʿudiyya: Bayna al-Nashʾah wa-l-Tatawwur, 2nd ed. (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Azhariyya, 1995); Sultan al-Qahtani, al-Riwaya fi al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya al-Saʿudiyya: Nashʾatuha wa-Tatawwuruha, 1930–1989 (Riyadh: al-Safahat al-Dhahabiyya, 1998); Muhammad Salih al-Shanti, Fann al-Riwaya fi alAdab al-Saʿudi al-Muʿasir (Jazan: Nadi Jazan al-Adabi, 1990). 5 Mansur al-Hazimi, Mawsuʿat al-Adab al-ʿArabi al-Saʿudi al-Hadith: Nusus Mukhtara wa-Dirasat. Al-Mujallad al-Khamis: AlRiwaya (Riyadh: Dar al-Mufradat, 2001); Hasan al-Naʿmi, al-Riwaya al-Saʿudiyya: Waqiʿuha wa-Tahawwulatuha (Riyadh: Wizarat al-Thaqafa wa-l-Iʿlam, 2009). 35 40 45 50 55 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 3 historical and social changes in Saudi Arabia.6 To date no comprehensive study in the historical discipline has focused on Saudi novels as a reflection of Saudi society and the transformations it has experienced. The basic premise of this article is that the fictional-literary text can serve as a valuable source for the study and understanding of various developments in society. This is in line with the Critical Theory school, which holds that literature cannot construct ahistorical and objective meanings and every literary work is rooted in a particular ideological and historical context. Terry Eagleton argued that literature was inevitably saturated with ideologies and politics. It cannot be the subject of abstract theoretical research but must be the subject of political observation within specific social contexts. According to him, every literary work expresses some perspective on history and culture.7 The connection between history and literature seems almost self-evident, including the correlation between a historical event and a literary narrative. History is narrated through stories and the stories themselves have a historical charge. Thus, it can be assumed that there is a close connection between the historical and the literary text.8 This approach was first prevalent among the discipline of literature (the school of New-Historicism), especially since the 1980s, and emphasized©that literary and non-literary texts have equal weight.9 Many Saudi novels, in addition to being artistic products, deal with the realities within which they operate and with a wide range of issues preoccupying Saudi society, and therefore can also shed new light on historical events. In a country where the media has always been tightly supervised, and which has very few cultural platforms, literature, and the novel in particular, served as an almost exclusive channel of expression, especially during the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet entered the Kingdom. Novels are an important platform for discussing social issues, amplifying suppressed voices, and conveying social criticism and protest. Many Saudi women, among them authors of novels, have argued that through literature they can convey messages that in any other situation would surely have been censored. The fictional nature of literature also provides protection against harassment, punishment, and incarceration.10 6 For example, see Muhammad Yahya Abu Milha, Surat al-Akhar: al-Gharbi wa-l-Yahudi fi al-Riwaya al-Saʿudiyya (Abha, Saudi Arabia: Nadi Abha al-Adabi, 2018); Asmaʾ al-Ahmadi, Ishkaliyat al-Dhat al-Sarida fi al-Riwaya al-Nisaʿiyya alSaʿudiyya, 1999–2012 (Beirut: al-Dar al-ʿArabiyya li-l-ʿUlum, 2020); Sihmi al-Hajiri, Jadaliyyat al-Matn wa-l-Tashkil: alTafra al-Riwaʾiyya fi al-Saʿudiyya (Haʾil, Saudi Arabia: al-Nadi al-Adabi bi-Haʾil, 2010); Mazin al-Harthi, ‘Social Transformations in the Saudi Novel: Ibrahim Al-Nassir as a Case Study’ (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2015); Mohammed al-Hasoun, ‘Social Criticism in the Saudi Novel, 1990—Present Day’ (PhD diss., University of Exeter, 2008); Hifz al-Rahman al-Islahi, al-Nazʿa al-Ijtimaʿiyya fi al-Riwaya al-Saʿudiyya (Beirut: Jadawel, 2011); Husayn alManasra, Dhakirat Riwayat al-Tisʿinat: Qiraʾat fi al-Riwaya al-Saʿudiyya (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2008); Hasan al-Naʿmi, Rajʿ al-Basar: Qiraʾat fi al-Riwaya al-Saʿudiyya (Jeddah: al-Nadi al-Adabi al-Thaqafi bi-Jeddah, 2004). Islahi, for example, dedicates an entire chapter of his book to ‘social aspects of [Saudi students] going away to study abroad’ (196–205). However, his discussion of this highly important subject is quite superficial as his treatment of the relevant novels is merely informative and descriptive and not sufficiently analytical. Another example is the book by Muhammad Abu Milha that fails to observe the subject of the Other in the Saudi novel through a rational time perspective and does not show how this subject progressed and evolved in the Saudi novel of the 90s in comparison to earlier times, and what the reasons for these developments were. Abu Milha uses examples from a jumble of novels from the beginning of the 80s to the middle of the 2000s, while ignoring the development of the Saudi novel over time and ignoring the contexts of these examples within the novels. My article will avoid these pitfalls as will be explained below. 7 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 169–89. 8 Fruma Zachs, ‘Text and Context: The Image of the Merchant in Early Nahda Fiction,’ Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 101 (2011): 483. 9 Hunter Cadzow, Alison Conway, and Bryce Traister, ‘New Historicism,’ Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism (2005); Sarah Maza, ‘Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism, and Cultural History, or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Interdisciplinarity,’ Modern Intellectual History 1, no. 2 (2004): 249–65. 10 Al-Rasheed, A Most Masculine State, 32. 60 65 70 75 80 85 4 E. GILADI The article focuses on the novel in order to examine voices that operated within Saudi society and moved on the spectrum between the adoption and expression of the regime’s hegemonic discourse, on the one hand, and its rejection and the creation of an alternative and critical discourse, on the other. It is based on a critical reading and analysis of some thirty Saudi novels written during the second half of the 20th century, with an emphasis on novels written between 1980 and 2000—years in which the preoccupation with the Western ‘other’ in the Saudi novel was most prominent for reasons that will be discussed below.11 The analysis I will propose is a critical one (not a literary analysis) that includes not only scrutiny of the text, but also extra-textual analysis in which reference is made to the broad context in which the novel was written, and in some cases also to its target audiences and the author’s biography. For the purposes of this article, Saudi novels have been defined as novels written by authors with Saudi citizenship who reside in Saudi Arabia, and who deal with Saudi Arabia directly or implicitly. ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif’s works, including his quintet of novels Cities of Salt, were not included in the definition of the Saudi novel, since while Munif was the son of a Saudi father, he himself was born in Jordan and later lived in Iraq and Syria. Most studies on the Saudi novel support the assertion that Munif is not a Saudi writer.12 An important tool for examining the social role of a novel is the ‘reception test’. A basic axiom in the sociological study of literature is that an enquiry into the role of books in society requires looking not only at the writers and the writing, but also at the readers and the reading. However, since the article is based on reading and analysing many novels, it was impossible to apply the reception test to each one and irresponsible to apply it only to some of them. However, for the purpose of mapping all Saudi novels written during the study period, relevant bibliographic studies and bibliometrics were used,13 and the novels selected for analysis were mainly written by well-known writers in Saudi Arabia and/or those that have been reviewed by critics and/or those appearing in anthologies of Saudi literature and in works of research on the Saudi novel. After an overview of the treatment of the issue of the ‘other’ in Arabic and Saudi novels, from their beginnings in the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, the article will focus on this topic in light of the novels of the 1980s and 1990s against the background of the changes taking place in Saudi society at that time, providing examples and citations from selected novels. The article will discuss the changes that have taken place in the perception of the ‘other’ as reflected in the Saudi novel and analyse the conclusions that emerge from this. It will show that over time, the discourse has evolved and changed and become less dichotomous and stereotypical and more complex, as the novels reflected a dynamic 11 The literary atmosphere has changed a great deal since the beginning of the 2000s and the Saudi novel has entered a new phase of development. During that time, the number of published Saudi novels has risen dramatically and with it the level of media attention and the interest of literary critics. In addition, the Saudi novel has gradually become more widely known, and not just the bon ton of the Saudi literary and cultural elite. In that time, Saudi novels began participating in well-known literary competitions and Saudi writers even won some very important Arab and international literary prizes. Dozens of Saudi novels started to be translated into foreign languages and received worldwide distribution, which also helped to increase their popularity back home; see Khalid Ahmad al-Yusuf, ‘Al-Riwaya alSaʿudiyya fi Taʾaluqiha: bayn al-Habk wa-l-Jawda wa-l-Tahaluk wa-l-Daʿaf,’ Al-Jubah 35 (Spring 2012): 20. Therefore, the topic of the Saudi novel of the 2000s is beyond the scope of this article. 12 While Dib mentions Munif’s works, many other leading critics such as al-Qahtani, al-Naʿmi and Mansur al-Hazimi do not mention him at all. 13 For example, Hasan bin Hijab al-Hazimi and Khalid bin Ahmad al-Yusuf, Muʿjam al-Ibdaʿ al-Adabi fi al-Mamlaka alʿArabiyya al- Saʿudiyya: al-Riwaya (al-Baha: Nadi al-Baha al-Adabi, 2008). 90 95 100 105 110 115 120 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 5 discourse between Saudi and Western society. My main argument is that these developments attest to a ‘bottom-up’ change in social and political thought in Saudi society and indicate a shift from the adoption and expression of the regime’s hegemonic discourse 125 with regard to the Western ‘other’ to the creation of an alternative one that is more independent and even critical. The ‘other’ in the Arabic and in the Saudi novel Contact with Europe and with the Europeans has been one of the important sources of inspiration for the writers of fiction in Arabic since the beginning of 130 the nahda (awakening).14 When Arab countries examined the nature of their national identity and aspired to independence, the need to understand and appreciate the influence of European culture on Arab societies was reflected in Arab novels, especially those written in the interwar period, but also at later stages. Writers from a variety of countries in the region chose the various encounters with 135 the West as the central theme of their works.15 Two of the salient hallmarks of those encounters were: 1) Ambivalent feelings towards©the West such as fear and fascination, attraction and rejection. 2) Critical self-exploration of the ‘self’ versus the ‘other’. 140 As Muhammad Siddiq wrote: ‘In modern history, the quest for identity, whether individual, communal, or national, in Egypt as in other Arab and Islamic states and societies, has unfolded against an increasingly more troubled (and troubling) awareness of the cultural “Other”’.16 In the Saudi novel, the theme of the ‘other’ (not necessarily the Western ‘other’) has 145 been prominently present since its inception in the 1930s. The relatively extensive engagement with this issue is consistent with the concept of ‘contrastive’ construction of identity. That is, the construction of the self’s identity on the basis of an ideologicalcultural struggle with the ‘other’, or actually as an antithesis to its identity. In other words, the ‘self’ develops a kind of independent essence only in relation to the existence of the 150 ‘other’.17 According to French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs, ‘every group develops a memory of its own past that highlights its unique identity vis-à-vis other groups. These reconstructed images provide the group with an account of its origin and development 14 The nahda period had two partially overlapping facets. Culturally, it marked the resurgence of linguistic, literary, and journalistic activity, which began in the first half of the 19th century and persisted well into the early 20th century. The political side, which focused on issues of identity and nationhood, evolved in the latter half of the 19th century as a response to direct and indirect colonialism. See Fruma Zachs, ‘Subversive Voices of the Daughters of the Nahda: Alice _ al-Bustani and Riwayat Saʾiba (1891),’ Hawwa 9 (2011): 332–333, note 1. 15 Roger Allen, ‘The Mature Arabic Novel outside Egypt,’ in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),195. See also Issa J. Boullata, ‘Encounter between East and West: A Theme in Contemporary Arab Novels,’ Middle East Journal 30, no. 1 (Winter, 1976): 49–62; Rasheed El-Enany, Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction (London: Routledge, 2006); Najm ʿAbdallah Kazim, Nahnu wal-Akhar fi al-Riwaya al-ʿArabiyya al-Muʿasira (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 2013); Mohammed Ali Shawabkeh, Arabs and the West: A Study in the Modern Arabic Novel, 1935–1985 (al-Karak, Jordan: Muʾta University, 1992). 16 Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel, xvii. 17 Riad M. Nasser, Palestinian Identity in Jordan and Israel: The Necessary ‘Others’ in the Making of a Nation (New York: Routledge, 2005), 4–5. 6 E. GILADI and thus allow it to recognize itself through time’.18 The adoption of this approach made sense in the first decades of Saudi Arabia’s existence, in the absence of a solid basis for a ‘self-sufficient’ construction of identity. The national awakening that rocked the Middle East largely missed Saudi society, as unlike many other countries in the region, Saudi Arabia never experienced a direct struggle with a Western imperialist power (though it was intrinsically defined and shaped through its relationships with imperialist powers, especially the British and Americans19). Two important factors that underpinned the development of national identity in Saudi Arabia were the political leadership of the Kingdom’s founder, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Ibn Saʿud (d. 1953), and the discovery of oil that enabled national integration. At the same time, there was no conception of a national territorial state in the homeland (watan). Studies dealing with this issue agree that nationalism in _ the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in the sense of the people’s recognition of their unity and identity, was under-developed even several decades after its establishment.20 Literary scholar Hasan al-Naʿmi points out that the issue of the ‘other’ was more prominent than any other when the Saudi novel was in its infancy, and the first wave of novels addressed the issue, taking various approaches that included rejection, astonishment, and relative neutrality. The early interest in this subject, which was formed in leading novels of the period, emphasized©the worry that accompanied the perception of the ‘other’ and the tension underlying that perception, ranging from fear of the ‘other’ to the need for it.21 The main concern of the first Saudi novel, al-Tawʾaman (‘The Twins’, 1930),22 was to address the problem of sensitive cultural relations between East and West and warn of the danger of the ‘other’ and the dangers of the Western education system for the younger generation. Its presentation of matters is dichotomous and the author’s negative attitude towards the West is very evident. The West is presented as an absolute evil with which the East cannot live in peace, and which should be avoided as much as possible, or fought against with the means of preserving the values and traditions of Eastern society. In the novel al-Baʿath (‘The Resurrection’, 1948),23 among the first novels written in Saudi Arabia, there is also a preoccupation with the Western ‘other’ and a negative attitude towards it is evident, although this is not the main issue. The main ‘other’ in this novel is OrientalIndian—a different ‘other’, to whom the attitude is different in that it expresses an aspiration to imitate and learn from it. The ‘other’ in Thaman al-Tadhiya (‘The Price of Sacrifice’, 1959),24 which is considered the first ‘artistic’ novel in Saudi Arabia, is Egyptian. 18 Cited in Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 4. On the separation of the self and the other as part of the construction of a national identity, see Samira Alayan and Elie Podeh, ‘Introduction: Views of Others in School Textbooks—A Theoretical Analysis,’ in Multiple Alterities: Views of Others in Textbooks of the Middle East, eds. Elie Podeh and Samira Alayan (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 4–9. 19 On that subject see Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 20 Avi Kohel, ‘National Cohesion in a Changing Reality: Saudi Arabia Facing Modernization, 1964–1982,’ (PhD. diss., Bar-Ilan University, 2005), 259. 21 Al-Naʿmi, al-Riwaya al-Saʿudiyya, 40; feelings of ambivalence towards the West appeared already in al-Jabarti’s chronicle, composed following the French conquest of Egypt in 1798. See El-Enany, Arab Representations of the Occident, 33. 22 ʿAbd al-Quddus al-Ansari, al-Tawʾaman (Damascus: Matbaʿat al-Taraqi, 1930). 23 Muhammad ʿAli Maghribi, al-Baʿath (Cairo: Matbaʿat Misr, 1948). 24 Hamid Damanhuri, Thaman al-Tadhiya (Cairo: Dar al-Qalam, 1959). 155 160 165 170 175 180 185 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 7 The main issue addressed in it is the temptations facing Saudi students going to study outside the Kingdom. In that period, the prime destination was Egypt and hence Egypt’s status as the ‘other’ of the period in Saudi eyes. The 1980s: back to dealing with the ‘other’ King Faysal’s reign (1964–1975) was marked by a dramatic increase in oil revenues, which were used to make huge investments in welfare, health, education, and infrastructure. Faysal viewed all of this as a means of national and political consolidation and improving the grip of the central government in the various sectors of Saudi society.25 Oil revenues allowed Faysal to establish a new ‘social contract’ with the people, thanks to which he was able to raise the standard of living, provide citizens with a free education and create a citizens’ cradle-to-grave welfare system for the benefit of the general public. The beneficiaries of the rise in standards of living were supposed, in return, to relinquish demands for political representation.26 With time and rising oil revenues, Saudi Arabia has become a capitalist welfare state providing its citizens with housing, free medical services, study abroad scholarships, marriage grants, tax exemptions, high government subsidies on electricity, water, food, oil and more.27 Economic well-being began to change the face of society and push it towards new encounters with the ‘other’, especially the Western one. These encounters took place mainly in the West, when members of Saudi society travelled abroad for study, tourism, or © trade. In his book on the concept of modernism in Saudi Arabia, Saudi intellectual and academic ʿAbdallah al-Ghadhdhami writes that since 1975, the number of students sent to the West for academic studies and vocational training has increased significantly. At one point, he said, the number of students reached more than 100,000 in the United States alone. When the families accompanying them are added to that number, they reach hundreds of thousands. The contact that those Saudis had with the West was on varying levels, but many of them became acquainted with the West and experienced it directly—something that did not happen significantly before the period of affluence. The diverse effects of this contact were reflected in the literary writing of that generation.28 In the 1980s, the preoccupation with the ‘other’ returned to the Saudi novel after a rather long period of decline.29 The first novels of the 1980s, such as Fata min Haʾil (‘A Girl from the City of Haʾil’)30 and al-Sinyura (‘The Signora’),31 touched on a variety of issues related to identity, such as regional identity, Saudi national identity, pan-Arab identity, Islamic identity, and more. But their main theme, which is also the most prominent one in the Saudi novel of the 1980s, is the Western ‘other’, or East-West relations, a theme that was addressed mainly through the prism of Saudi students traveling abroad for higher education. This trend continued with three additional novels: Lahzat Daʿf (‘A Moment of 25 Joseph Kostiner and Joshua Teitelbaum, ‘State Formation and the Saudi Monarchy,’ in Middle Eastern Monarchies: The Challenge of Modernity, ed. Joseph Kostiner (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000), 131–49. Gerald De Gaury, Faisal—King of Saudi Arabia (London: Trinity, 1966), 149–50; Joshua Teitelbaum, Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Opposition (Washington DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000), 17. 27 Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 116–24. 28 ʿAbdallah al-Ghadhdhami, Hikayat al-Hadatha fi al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya al-Saʿudiyya, 3rd ed. (Casablanca: al-Markaz alThaqafi al-ʿArabi, 2005), 165–68. 29 Al-Naʿmi, al-Riwaya al-Saʿudiyya, 49–50. 30 Muhammad ʿAbduh Yamani, Fata min Haʾil (Riyadh: al-Matabiʿ al-Ahliyya, 1980). 31 ʿIsam Khuqayr, al-Sinyura (Jeddah: Tihama, 1981). 26 190 195 200 205 210 215 220 8 E. GILADI Weakness’),32 Wujuh bi-la Makyaj (‘Faces Without Make-Up’),33 and Qulub Mallat al-Tirhal (‘Hearts Tired of Wandering’),34 which dealt almost exclusively with the subject. This included a secondary engagement with changes in Saudi society due to foreign influences and the culture of affluence of the oil generation. In the 1990s, the topic of the Western ‘other’ continued to be one of the most popular themes, with no less than fourteen novels dealing with it at various levels. One of the prominent motifs in the Saudi novels of the 1980s dealing with the issue of the ‘other’ is the superiority of Arab-Muslim culture over Western culture in terms of values, morals, faith, and spirituality. A good example of this is the novel al-Sinyura (1981) by ʿIsam Khuqayr. The novel tells the story of a Saudi student named Safwan Ibrahim who travels to study musicology in Milan, meets a local Christian girl named Mariana, falls in love with her and marries her. After their wedding, the two travel throughout Europe and finally settle in Saudi Arabia. Slowly, Mariana learns about Islam, gets closer to Muslim religion and culture, and finally also converts to Islam. It is clear that the author of the novel wanted to convey the message that Islam and Muslim-Arab culture are superior to Christianity and Western culture in general, and especially at a time when this superiority is reflected in moral and human values and not just in matters of dogma and faith. It seems that the target audience of the novel is mainly Arab students who go to study in the West and therefore it is something of a call to be influential rather than being influenced, and to spread the Arab-Muslim religion and culture through a personal example of values and morals. After Safwan and Mariana decide to get engaged, they travel to Mariana’s parents’ cabin in the Alps so that Safwan can ask for Mariana’s hand from her father. When Mariana tells her parents about the relationship between her and Safwan and his opposition to physical contact before marriage as a religious precept, they are very happy and especially her father, who is pleasantly surprised and hurries to classify Safwan as a moral and ethical person, contrary to the prevailing reality in Europe: ‘We in this country, and throughout Europe, live in a state of moral decay. Human society is in a state of social and moral deterioration’.35 Later, the enthusiastic father immediately gives his consent to the marriage between the two (even though he met his intended son-in-law only a few hours earlier) and says to his daughter: ‘Marry him, have as many children as possible and let him raise them according [to the values] in which he was raised and educated. The future of humanity depends on the dissemination of these values’.36 Later on, the father emphasizes©to his daughter: ‘Have forty sons, if you can, and do not interfere in their education. Safwan has turned his religion and faith into a way of life’.37 The words that Khuqayr puts in the mouth of Mariana’s father express a complete self-deprecation of the West and a recognition of the superiority of the ArabIslamic culture. At the end of the novel, when the couple is already living in Saudi Arabia, Mariana decides to convert to Islam. What convinced her, she said, was the fact that values such as friendship, brotherhood, and love among members of society are an 32 Fuʾad Sadiq Mufti, Lahzat Daʿaf (Jeddah: Tihama, 1981). Ghalib Hamza Abu al-Faraj, Wujuh bi-la Makyaj (Beirut: Dar al-Aafaq al-Jadida, 1985). Ghalib Hamza Abu al-Faraj, Qulub Mallat al-Tirhal (Beirut: Dar al-Aafaq al-Jadida, 1985). 35 Khuqayr, al-Sinyura, 44. 36 Ibid., 45. 37 Ibid. 33 34 225 230 235 240 245 250 255 260 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 9 integral part of Saudi/Muslim existence, while in the West they are lacking. The consequences, according to her, are phenomena such as bitterness, violence and cruelty that pervade Western society.38 The novel Fata min Haʾil (1980) by Muhammad ʿAbduh Yamani, who was the Saudi Minister of Communications when the novel was published (and probably also at the time of its writing),39 presents the encounter between East and West in several ways. It tells the story of Hisham, a young Saudi who finishes engineering studies in Riyadh, enlists in the army as an engineer and is stationed in the northern city of Haʾil. After a while he is sent to the U.S. to study for a master’s degree in engineering at the University of Michigan. Hisham experiences acculturation difficulties at first but adopts a pragmatic approach and manages to integrate into his new surroundings without compromising his values. The story of Hisham’s adaptation and integration into American society provides interesting insights into the perception of the Western ‘other’ and East-West relations through contemporary Saudi eyes. One of the figures who significantly influenced Hisham’s encounter with the West was his roommate Tom. The narrator accuses Tom of stereotypical views of the East in general and of Saudi Arabia in particular, but commits the same sin when he describes Tom as a ‘typical’ American guy: tall, red-headed©, freckled, jeans-wearing, gum-chewing, whisky©drinking hedonist, who reacts with surprise and amazement to everything that is different from his way of life.40 Tom tries for a long time to convince Hisham to stop studying for a while and go out. He begs him to join him at a party and Hisham eventually agrees. But when he gets there, he immediately regrets it, as he sees men and women smoking, drinking alcohol and dancing together. The most popular girl at the university asks him to dance with her, but he rejects her approach and quickly leaves. When Tom returns to their room and explains to Hisham that he was just trying to expose him to American society, Hisham confesses that he is not really interested in it. The two end their conversation with a quote from a ballad by Rudyard Kipling: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet’.41 When Hisham returns to Saudi Arabia for a vacation at the end of his first year of studies, his family members could hardly believe what he told them about life in America being dominated by materialism, excessive luxury, and the lack of importance of interpersonal relationships and family life there. At the end of Hisham’s speech, his wife’s father sums up by saying, ‘Praise be to Allah who has given us the grace of Islam and given us moral values [. . .] Culture is first and foremost virtues, thanks to which we built our ancient culture. With their help, and the help of Allah, 38 Ibid., 84–5. Mansur al-Hazimi, ‘Yamani, Muhammad ʿAbduh,’ in Qamus al-Adab wa-l-Udabaʾ, (Riyadh: Darat al-Malik ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, 2013) vol. 3, 1787–88; Ahmad Saʿid bin Silm, Mawsuʿat al-Udabaʾ wa-l-Kuttab al-Saʿudiyyin (Medina: Nadi al-Madina alAdabi, 1992), vol. 3, 310–11. 40 Yamani, Fata min Haʾil, 216, 218–19. 41 Ibid., 222–30. The quotation is from Kipling’s ‘Ballad of East and West,’ but is taken out of its original context, which actually claims that friendship between East and West can overcome all differences: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement©seat;But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! For the poem in its entirety, see http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_eastwest.htm The same quotation from the poem also appears in al-Sinyura, and there, too, it is taken out of context. 39 265 270 275 280 285 290 295 10 E. GILADI we will restore the days of glory and power’.42 As he says, the moral supremacy of the East over the West goes hand in hand with Islam—Allah has given the Muslims the grace of Islam and thus has given them moral values. Thanks to them, Islamic culture achieved the glory of the past and superiority over the West, and thanks to them it will also regain all this. Another case study is the novel Lahzat Daʿf (1981), which deals with the charged encounter between East and West through the story of a Saudi student named Tariq who travels to study in the United States. Tariq tries with all his might to protect himself from temptations, and at first even succeeds in this, thanks to the faith and values in which he was raised and educated, but finally, in a moment of weakness, he succumbs to temptation. He becomes acquainted with an American girl who ‘drags him down’ to drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes. Eventually, he marries her, and they even have a child, but shortly afterwards they get divorced. Even when it seems that he manages to emerge from the vortex as he returns home and marries a Saudi woman, we find that he is unable to do so because the seed of calamity has already been planted. The novel is dedicated by the author to the younger generation ‘subject to suffering and embarrassment and prone to deterioration’,43 and is intended to warn Saudis of Western temptations. Tariq flies from Jeddah to London and from there to Los Angeles. In London, his first meeting point (and that of many Saudi students) with the West, he walks around the area of Piccadilly Circus and to his amazement sees boys and girls sitting together and some even hugging ‘shamelessly’ and without anyone paying special attention to it. He enters a restaurant and immediately runs away when he sees bottles of alcohol on display and people sitting, drinking, talking, and laughing loudly. He regains control of himself and realizes that he will have to get used to © these sights from now on. He felt ‘a stranger in this environment and among these people, engaged in a constant search for pleasure or pastimes’.44 Suddenly, he stands in front of one of the cinemas and his jaw drops when he sees a movie poster showing the star completely naked. Afterwards, he gets drawn to a dubious nightclub. He feels mesmerized©by the sights and is about to enter, but while feeling in his pocket for the entrance fee, he came across a small Quran, and he regains consciousness. On a plane to Los Angeles, Tariq sits next to a beautiful woman in her 50s who soon begins to seduce him. When the woman realizes©that her attempts are in vain, she begins to talk to Tariq and ask him about his country. He answers all her questions and then, at her request, explains to her about the Prophet Muhammad, the Quran, and the differences between Christianity and Islam. He discovers how ignorant she is and goes on to explain Islam to her and the sublime principles it has brought into the world. He also told her about the Muslim position regarding Jesus, that he was not really crucified and did not ascend to heaven, as is written in the Quran, and she was immediately convinced of the correctness of his words.45 42 The same quotation from the poem also appears in al-Sinyura, and there, too, it is taken out of context. Yamani, Fata min Haʾil, 281. Mufti, Lahzat Daʿaf, 3. 44 Ibid., 18. 45 Ibid., 28–7. 43 300 305 310 315 320 325 330 335 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 11 East-West-Gender Along with the issue of the superiority of Arab-Muslim culture over Western culture in terms of values, morals, and faith, the second prominent motif in the Saudi novels of the 1980s that dealt with the issue of the ‘other’ is the encounter between the East, represented by a Saudi man, and the West, represented by a European or American woman. This is a recurring motif in all Arabic literature dealing with the encounter between East and West: the relationship formed between a man and a woman becomes a prism through which the Arab protagonist learns about the West and its cultural and social mores. This relationship also usually develops into a sexual one, in which the Arab protagonist experiences liberation from the traditionalism of the society from which he comes. Variations on this motif can be found in well-known novels such as Tawfiq al-Hakim’s ʿUsfur min al-Sharq (‘A Bird from the East’, 1938), Yahya Haqqi’s Qindil Umm Hashim (‘The Saint’s Lamp’, 1944), Suhayl Idris’s al-Hayy al-Latini (‘The Latin Quarter’, 1953), and al-Tayyib Salih’s Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal (‘Season of Migration to the North’, 1966). The gender dynamics created when the female figure becomes the embodiment of the powerful West, overturns traditional patriarchal power dynamics. Therefore, the sexual aspect of the encounter is not just a matter of liberation for the Arab protagonist, but an opportunity to exercise a form of dominance and control in the face of the West. In contrast, most of the Saudi novels that dealt with the encounter between the Saudi man and the Western woman presented a different and unique gender dynamic. In the Saudi case, gender dynamics bring to light the ‘uniqueness’ (khusūsiyya) approach that underlies Saudi _ _ religious nationalism.46 According to this, Saudi Arabia has a special status among the Arab and Muslim peoples by virtue of its connection with the cradle of Islam, the presence of Islam’s two holiest places in its territory, and its being the most religious and conservative Muslim state.47 Saudi national identity is sharpened or ‘made unique’ thanks to religious identity, but its distinct expression is in fact the special status of Saudi women in the traditional and conservative society. In other words, Saudi ‘uniqueness’ is mainly expressed through the modesty of Saudi women and their adherence to the traditions and customs of their country, and this becomes even more valid when it meets a foreign environment. The discourse on these issues is sharpened even more when it is put in the mouth of a Western woman, as occurs in many Saudi novels of the period dealing with the Western ‘other’. There, Western women frequently testify that their freedom is fake and that they envy Saudi women. A good example of this can be found in Fata min Haʾil in the words of Jean, an American student who is enthusiastic about Saudi men’s jealousy towards their women. When Hisham, the protagonist, asks Jean if she understands that the other side of the coin is the loss of some of her freedom, she replies: Do you think that I am free and that I should fear loss of liberty? [. . .] It is true that the woman here [in America] enjoys full freedom, and this can also look beautiful at first, but what happens in the end? We hang out and dance and do whatever we want, but as we get older, 46 This kind of nationalism diverges from the well-known model of nationalism in its secular manifestation and colonial and anti-colonial variants. Religious nationalism is defined as a form of politicized collective representation, embedded in institutions, the purpose of which is to create a godly community. Roger Friedland, ‘Religious Nationalism and the Problem of Collective Representation,’ Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001), 125–52. 47 This approach is well expressed in the Vision 2030 plan aiming to limit the Kingdom’s dependence on oil. The document opens thus: ‘The first pillar of our vision is our status as the heart of the Arab and Islamic worlds. We recognize that Allah the Almighty has bestowed on our lands a gift more precious than oil. Our Kingdom is the Land of the Two Holy Mosques, the most sacred sites on earth, and the direction of the Kaaba (Qibla) to which more than a billion Muslims turn at prayer.’ See: Government of Saudi Arabia, Vision 2030 (2016), 6. 340 345 350 355 360 365 370 375 12 E. GILADI the men disappear. [. . .] I wish I could find a man who would fight for me, a man who would slap my face if he saw me with another man, a man who would make me feel that I was only his and that he was only mine.48 Another novel that relates to this matter is Wujuh bi-la Makyaj (1985) by Ghalib Hamza Abu al-Faraj. The protagonist of the novel (whose name is never mentioned) is a kind of Don Juan, a pilot on a Saudi airline, who charms every woman he meets with his ‘Eastern charm’. In contrast to the novels mentioned above, this novel, as well as other novels by Abu al-Faraj, polemicizes less with the West to highlight the superiority of Muslim culture, and is more focused on ‘bringing evidence’ from Western women, or Eastern ones living in the West, that the freedom they enjoy is an illusion, that women in the West are no more than a commodity exploited by men, and that they actually envy Saudi women who are guarded and protected and live a good and dignified life appropriate to their nature. The author paints a dichotomous picture in which Saudi Arabia is a place of morality and goodness compared to the West, a place of moral and ethical corruption.49 These examples from the Saudi novel relate perfectly to Laura Nader’s article ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women’, in which she expands Edward Said’s observation that the Muslim world exists ‘for’ the West to include the notion that the West also exists ‘for’ the Islamic world and serves as important contrastive comparison which restricts and controls women’s resistance. She also argues that claims of ‘our women are better off than your women’ form an essentially male discourse that serves to distract women from the real issues and from the processes that serve to control them in both worlds.50 By taking a position of superiority vis-à-vis the ‘other’, says Nader, ‘both East and West can rationalize the position of their women and manage their relation to the “other”, at least as long as they can keep the fiction of the other in place’.51 Thus, the place of women in Saudi society and maintaining their modesty and dignity define the boundaries of Saudi religious nationalism. All this is clarified in the Saudi novel of the 1980s, against the background of the encounter between the Saudi man and Western women and the emphasis on the clear differences between Saudi Arabia and the West in this matter. 380 385 390 395 400 405 The 1990s: Western cultural penetration of Saudi Arabia If in the Saudi novel of the 1980s, we mainly came across Saudis travelling©to the 410 West and experiencing the differences, gaps, and conflicts there, in the 1990s, largely thanks to the Gulf War, the situation becomes more complicated, and the location of the encounter also becomes Saudi Arabia itself. Representatives of the West are physically on Saudi soil, whether they are military experts, employees of the Aramco Oil Corporation and their families, antiquities hunters, and more. Moreover, 415 48 Yamani, Fata min Haʾil, 329. In addition to Wujuh bi-la Makyaj, see Abu al-Faraj, Qulub Mallat al-Tirhal; idem. La Shams Fawqa al-Madina (‘There is No Sun above the City’) (Beirut: Dar al-Aafaq al-Jadida, 1990). 50 Laura Nader, ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,’ Cultural Dynamics 2, no. 3 (1989): 323–355. 51 Ibid., 328. 49 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 13 Western culture began to penetrate Saudi Arabia through television, consumerism, and imported technology, affecting Saudi society and especially the younger generation.52 The novel Dumuʿ Musallaha (‘Armed Tears’, 1997), for example, takes place around a Saudi girls’ school and deals with the moral deterioration of the younger generation, with most of the blame falling on Western films and TV series and their evil influence. For example, when one of the novel’s protagonists runs away from home, one of the school’s teachers claims that ‘this scenario is quite possible if this is a student affected by foreign films and foreign TV series, which have already spoiled the minds of many young people’.53 In another case, the deputy principal gets into an argument with a student who turned her school uniform into a tight dress with a décolletage. Zahraʾ, the school counsellor, talks to the girl and explains to her why it is important to maintain modesty © and follow the rules of tradition, and why the freedom she wants is actually false. This is very reminiscent of things already mentioned above, but the essential difference is that here the object of persuasion is a Saudi girl who wants to resemble Western girls she has seen on TV and whose freedom she envies.54 Zahraʾ the counsellor©encounters more and more cases of moral deterioration among the younger generation, culminating in the case of a young girl who considered suicide after getting involved in a romantic telephone relationship with a man she had never met—a relationship formed and greatly influenced by the foreign TV series that both watched and wished to imitate. Zahraʾ concludes that this is ‘not just a crisis of a girl who stumbled in a moment of weakness, but a crisis of an entire society that allowed evildoers to penetrate the young minds that were opened to the sick Western media and toxic satellite channels’.55 Further examples of Western cultural penetration of Saudi culture can be found in alFirdaws al-Yabab (‘The Desolate Paradise’, 1999) by Layla al-Jahani. Through descriptions of the city of Jeddah and the changes it has undergone, al-Jahani discusses the radical social changes that have taken place in Saudi society, and the Westernization©and Americanization© of Saudi culture that have led to acute feelings of alienation and loss of identity. When the protagonist of the novel describes Jeddah, she talks about ‘a world of Coca-Cola fighting with Pepsi in an advertising campaign. A world of mobile phones, internet, laser disk, mad cow disease [. . .] and money, money, money [. . .] The money that nothing can withstand—a stormy sea that threatens to sweep away those who have and those who dream of it’.56 The city of Jeddah provides the setting for the novel, but it is also anthropomorphized© and stars in it as a character with a significant presence in the protagonist’s consciousness. The writer shapes the protagonist’s feeling that everything around her is collapsing and is no longer what it used to be, and she has nothing left to lose. When everything comes together, within a stream of consciousness, a sense of turmoil is created: People fill the streets and beaches - men and women, old and young with colorful shirts that are open to slightly above the navel, shorts, and long hair braided back like in the dubbed Mexican series. Cars with sunroofs, sweeping songs, video cameras and drum sounds. And 52 Sharif S. Elmusa, ‘Faust without the Devil? The Interplay of Technology and Culture in Saudi Arabia,’ Middle East Journal 51 no. 3 (Summer, 1997): 345–357. Mansur Jaʿfar Al Sayf and Najiba al-Sayyid ʿAli, Dumuʿ Musallaha (Beirut: Dar al-Safwa, 1997), 75. 54 Ibid., 154–56. 55 Ibid., 173–174. 56 Layla al-Jahani, al-Firdaws al-Yabab (Köln: Manshurat al-Jamal, 1999), 10. 53 420 425 430 435 440 445 450 455 14 E. GILADI sometimes dogs, in the back seat, with luxurious leather collars around their necks, make their way to the beaches. [. . .] Since when did people start walking with dogs on the streets of Jeddah? Since when did Jeddah start wearing clothes that are not hers?57 Indeed, the words that al-Jahani puts in the mouth of her protagonist suit well Lisa Wynn’s claim that the increasing commoditization of urban space in modern Jeddah is transform- 460 ing power structures and social practices.58 The late 1990s: changes in the perception of the ‘other’ In the late 1990s, there was a certain return to the confrontation with the Western ‘other’ on its own turf in the Saudi novel, alongside the return to other familiar patterns, yet with some changes indicating developments in the perception of the ‘self’ versus the ‘other’. A first example of this is al-Bahth ʿan al-Judhur (‘The Search for the Roots’).59 This novel attempts to address the issue of East-West relations from a different angle, that of a young Arab-American man who connects to his Eastern roots, converts to Islam, and discovers the superiority of the East over the West. In some ways, this is a return to the old formula of East-West relations seen in the novels of the 1980s, but the presentation of things here is less dichotomous and less didactic than previously. Furthermore, this novel portrays an honest recognition of the advantages of the West (progress, peace, democracy, freedoms) and even some criticism of the shortcomings of Arab states (restrictions on freedom of expression and lack of democracy). Another example of the change in trend in relation to the ‘other’ can be seen in Durus Idafiyya (‘Extra Lessons’) by Mansur al-Khariji.60 Seemingly, this is another novel about Saudi students who travel for study to the United States. However, this novel shows considerable progress in Saudi thinking and in the perception of Saudi identity vis-à-vis Western identity. It is less didactic, less stereotypical and presents a complex and multifaceted story of Saudis in the West and of the encounter with the West on Saudi soil. In the novels of the 1980s, the Saudis who come to the West are presented in two ways: either as self-confident and morally superior, unaffected by the West and its temptations yet influencing their environment and sweeping women off their feet, either through their personal charm or due to being ethical people; or as falling prey to the temptations of the West and losing themselves. In Durus Idafiyya, the presentation is complex because it has three protagonists, each expressing a different personality and a different kind of encounter with the West: ʿAbd al-Majid is the conservative and traditional one, who avoids the temptations of the West; Sulayman is the playboy who wants to get to know as many Western girls as possible and is generally fascinated by the West; and Bandar is somewhere in the middle between the two. But as the plot unfolds, the characters also evolve and none of the three remain in the initial box defining him. In the end, this novel, too, is conservative in 57 Ibid., 11. Lisa Wynn, ‘The Romance of Tahliyya Street: Youth Culture, Commodities and the Use of Public Space in Jiddah,’ Middle East Report 204 (1997): 30–31. 59 Muʾmina Abu Salih, al-Bahth ʿan al-Judhur (Riyadh: Maktabat al-ʿAbikan, 1998). 60 Mansur Muhammad al-Khariji, Durus Idafiyya (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya li-l-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1998). 58 465 470 475 480 485 490 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 15 its attitude towards©the ‘other’. One of its most salient messages is that marriages between East and West are doomed to fail—a message conveyed already in Lahzat Daʿf from the early 1980s (see above). However, Durus Idafiyya presents a much more complex picture than the dichotomous and stereotypical one provided in the past: the West is not uniform and has all kinds of layers and shades, not all American girls are swept off their feet by Saudi men and become convinced of their righteousness, etc. An interesting point of comparison between Durus Idafiyya and previous novels dealing with the Western ‘other’ is the initial, charged encounter in London between the Saudi student and the West. Unlike novels like Fata min Haʾil or Lahzat Daʿf that aimed to highlight the conflict and the negative-seductive side of this initial encounter, the culture shock experienced by the three young Saudi men in Durus Idafiyya is milder and certainly less negative. Moreover, it is evident that at least some of the protagonists are not really trying to struggle against the temptations. Since there are three protagonists, a complex and balanced presentation of the situation is possible and the different attitudes towards the encounter with the West are embodied in the character of the three protagonists. Naturally, the three immediately noticed the women who filled the streets and shops, dressed in ‘weird’ clothes that did not cover much of their bodies. Later, in a restaurant, ʿAbd al-Majid buried his head in the menu while the other two stared at the waitresses and at women who were present and did not even try to fight the temptation: 495 500 505 510 515 [Sulayman:] How can you look away when all this beauty, in its shapes and colors, is standing in front of you? [ʿAbd al-Majid:] It is possible with a strong will and knowledge that you are committing a crime if you do something that is forbidden according to the sharia. [Sulayman:] Is this the time for advice and preaching morality, bro? Look around you!61 ʿAbd al-Majid’s voice is reminiscent of the approach of previous novels about the West and its temptations. However, in the group’s dynamics, ʿAbd al-Majid is perceived as a nuisance and he expresses a minority position. It is possible that the changed attitude towards the West stems from the fact that at that time, the Saudis already knew the West better and were less naive than before, and some even wanted to open up further towards the West and get to know its culture. This interest is also expressed in the dialogue that develops between Bandar and Benjamin, his American roommate in the dorms. Benjamin believes that one should have as much fun as possible at a young age and with as many partners as possible, and then settle down at an older age. Bandar, however, says that as a Saudi Muslim he could not live that way (though he does not say that he would not want to). As the discussion progresses, Bandar comes to the conclusion, already prevalent in previous novels, that the gap between the cultures from which the two come is too great to bridge. What is interesting to see here is the development: whereas in the novels of the 1980s the discussion stops at this point (see the dialogue above between Hisham and Tom in Fata min Haʾil, which ends with a quote from Kipling’s 61 Ibid., 9–10. 520 525 530 535 16 E. GILADI ballad), in this novel the discussion continues and the two reach a common understanding that there is no need to bridge the gaps but that the existence of difference should be respected: [Benjamin:] I don’t care which of us is right. What matters is that you do what you think is right or what you want to do. Isn’t that enough? 540 [Bandar:] [. . .] The principles, customs, and traditions I inherited from previous generations, as an Easterner, are different from what you inherited from yours, because you and I are from different worlds, and we will never be able to reach an agreement on this issue. [Benjamin:] No one is asking you to decide on issues that have remained unresolved for centuries. In general, there is really no need to solve them because each country has its own traditions and customs.62 Further substantial development in the discourse concerning the Western ‘other’ can be found in Sharq al-Wadi (‘East of the Valley’) by the writer, academic, and liberal intellectual Turki al-Hamad.63 This novel, which concludes the 1990s, touches on many issues of identity and many important developments can be seen there regarding identity discourse in the Saudi novel. The novel is about three generations of the Kingdom—the first generation, which is at the centre©of the plot, is the founding generation (represented by the main protagonist Jabir); the second generation is the generation of abundance; and the third generation is the younger generation that is failing to find its place in modern Saudi Arabia. The plot of the novel presents a long journey of searching for some kind of half-real, half-mythical character, and in fact it is a parable for the search for the past and for roots at a times when everything around is changing and not necessarily for the better. At the beginning, the identity of the protagonist Jabir is very Najdī (Central Arabian) and very religious. What most profoundly affects his religious identity, and his identity in general, is the encounter with the Western ‘other’ on Saudi soil. The West is represented here by the American directors of Aramco and their spouses, and especially a woman named Ethel, the wife of Jabir’s manager, with whom he has a long affair. The complex relationship presented in Sharq al-Wadi between the Saudi man and the American woman, on Saudi soil, is a parable of the relationship between the Saudi ‘self’ and the Western ‘other’ from the perspective of the late 1990s. This is not another presentation of the Western woman swept off her feet by the Saudi man as we saw in the novels of the 1980s, but a complete reversal of roles. Jabir and his friends, who work as labourers©at Aramco’s oil production facilities, fantasize about ‘revenge’ on their American bosses through having sex with their wives, but it soon becomes clear that this is not really the case. Jabir is a kind of servant in the home of his American masters and later he also serves as a toy boy or sex slave for Ethel. The dynamics of gendered power relations between the Saudi man and the Western woman in this novel are radically different from those described in previous novels, and the West is clearly superior here over the East and not the other way around. The only time the Saudi protagonist apparently has power is in a sexual role-playing game in which the American mistress asks him to whip her to fulfil her sexual desires. 62 63 Ibid., 81–2. Turki al-Hamad, Sharq al-Wadi: Asfar min Ayyam al-Intizar, 2nd ed. (Beirut: Saqi, 2000). 545 550 555 560 565 570 BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES 17 Conclusions The theme of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ has been prominent in the Saudi novel since its inception in the 1930s. In the 1980s, preoccupation with the ‘other’ returned to the Saudi novel more forcefully, after economic affluence began to change the face of Saudi society and push it towards©new encounters with the ‘other’ that took place mainly on Western soil, when members of Saudi society came there for studies, tourism, or trade. The writers of the 1980s spoke with concern about the social changes taking place in the Kingdom and the dangers inherent in them, and talked about the crisis afflicting society. They therefore emphasized©the supremacy of Islam over Christianity and of Muslim culture over Western culture, both in terms of values and morals, and in terms of faith and spirituality. They wanted to present a religious and moral ideal that may have no longer existed at that time, but that one should strive for. In other words, they tried to construct Saudi identity in a ‘contrastive’ manner, through opposition to, and conflict with, the Western ‘other’. They polemicized with the West but largely turned inward and warned Saudi society against the temptations of the West. Attempts at a more ‘self-sufficient’ construction of Saudi identity in those novels relied on emphasizing©the concept of ‘uniqueness’ underlying Saudi national identity, built on the close connection between Saudi Arabia and its people to Islam and its heritage. This uniqueness is in fact the notion that Saudi Arabia has a special status among the Arab and Muslim peoples by virtue of its connection with the cradle of Islam, the presence of Islam’s two holiest places in its territory, and its being the most conservative Muslim state. However, the tangible expression of this national uniqueness, as evidenced by the novels of the period, was mainly the special status of women in Saudi society. Saudi women, their modesty, status, and place in society, were the main card in the Saudi altercation with the Western ‘other’ and a clear symbol of Saudi religious nationalism. As Laura Nader said, the West plays an important part in the construction of Islamic gender paradigms and in holding them in place. Paradigms are legitimated by their contrast with the West, especially a barbaric materialistic West.64 The discourse regarding the Western ‘other’ in those novels was characterized by © a highly dichotomous approach—the East is good, and the West is bad; the East is moral, ethical and believing, while the West is promiscuous, decadent and infidel; Islam is right, and Christianity is wrong. The message being sent was to beware of the temptations of the West and not to open up to Western society. This approach matched the hegemonic discourse and Zeitgeist in Saudi Arabia, where familiarity with the West was still quite preliminary and perceived as threatening. In the 1990s, the arena of encounter with the West expanded and Saudi Arabia itself became part of it. Representatives of the West in the form of military experts, employees of Aramco and their families, antiquities hunters, and others were physically found on Saudi soil. In addition, Western culture at that time began to penetrate Saudi culture through television, consumer culture and imported technology and greatly influenced Saudi society. These issues have been addressed in a rather complex and diverse way in the Saudi novel, with what they all have in common is feelings of alienation and loss of identity in the face of the intrusion of Western culture and its negative impact on Saudi society and its traditional culture. 64 Nader, ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,’ 333. 575 580 585 590 595 600 605 610 615 18 E. GILADI The slightly obsessive preoccupation with the ‘other’ in the Saudi novel, and especially with regard to encounters with the ‘other’ on Saudi soil, may indicate that the American presence in Saudi Arabia—both physical and cultural—is perceived as a form of colonialism that challenges Saudi national-religious identity. Anyone who claims that Saudi Arabia does not suffer from the complexes of the Middle Eastern countries that were under Western colonialism probably does not see the full picture, and certainly has not read Saudi novels.65 At the same time, in the novels of the late 1990s, changes in discourse could be identified that indicate developments in the perception of the ‘self’ versus the ‘other’. Even if the novels were still quite conservative, they presented a more complex picture of the West and of East-West relations than did the novels of the 1980s. The discourse has evolved and changed and become less dichotomous and stereotypical and more complex and genuine. In fact, the novels reflected a dynamic discourse between Saudi and Western society, as some of the novels of the end of the period under study even acknowledged the advantages and superiority of the West over the East, criticized the shortcomings of the Arab and Muslim world, and even used allegory to criticize Saudi inferiority in its complex relationship with the United States. A change of attitude in dealing with the ‘other’ in the Saudi novel may first indicate a shift from the adoption and expression of the regime’s hegemonic discourse to the creation of an alternative one that is freer, more independent, and even critical. Further, it can attest to the development of a sufficiently stable basis of authentic Saudi identity, in contrast to the situation that existed from the beginning of the Saudi novel into the 1980s, that necessitated a ‘contrastive’ construction of identity. The authors of the novels of the 1990s apparently already felt confident enough in their identity to look closely at the state of power relations between East and West, between Saudi Arabia and the United States, to paint an authentic picture and even promote tolerance towards the other. The ongoing but changing preoccupation with the ‘other’ in the Saudi novel, from its inception and even more so in the 1980s and 1990s, teaches us that for Saudi society as well this is an essential need and a perpetual interest that can only be updated. As Edward Said wrote: ‘The construction of identity [. . .] involves establishing opposites and “others” whose actuality is always subject to continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their differences from “us”. Each age and society re-creates its “Others”’.66 620 625 630 635 640 645 650 Disclosure statement Q3 No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). 65 Long, for example, claimed that the Saudis never developed the national inferiority complex and other psychological baggage that affected many nations that were under colonial rule. See David E. Long, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 44. 66 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Penguin, 1995), 332.