So so sheik(2)
I’d like to think that my ignorance was a form of innocence (wouldn’t we all?) and that the world was as young as I was back when I wore that mini skirt to dinner with the sheik. Because when all the romance, suddenly, turned into terror; into fury and fear, I felt like a defenseless, abandoned child. “This isn’t our fault,” I thought. “They’re all fucking crazy!” And of course, some of them were/are. But Americans often use innocence as an excuse/cover for the calculated, not to mention wildly miscalculated, and ruthless things we do. None of which leads where this post is going…
I’ve just finished a marvelous book called Eight Months on Ghazzzah St. It’s an eerily haunting story about the life of an English ex pat, a woman, living in Saudi. And it’s good. Most of the novel deals with this woman’s response to a period of aimless and excruciating loneliness; to isolation and months incarcerated in an apartment building with two Muslim wives. But it’s also full of mind bending information about what it means to be a devout Wahhabi. Scholars, for instance, advise the faithful not to throw out their garbage in the pages of the Saudi Gazette. “For those pages might contain the name of Allah.” Apparently, they also discourage the celebration of Christian holidays, even behind closed doors. The British Embassy hold their Christmas carol services under the guide of “Family Welfare Meetings.” I may have known that alcohol is strictly forbidden in the Kingdom. What I didn’t know is that foreigners resort to making their own. In bathtubs. Just like during American prohibition. Then, there’s this incidental passage that mentions teenage boys racing around and wrecking Ferraris. No seat belts. No license. The locals refer to it as “hot rodding.” And the punishment is flogging.
We have a British friend, Paul, who remembers flogging only too well. Not in Saudi but at a very fancy British public school in the middle of the English countryside. Paul’s father was a surgeon in Saudi in the early 80’s. According to Paul, “he made stupid amounts of money” and, like most Brits, sent his kids back to boarding school in England. Paul was six years old, his first night away from home. “Our headmaster used to go through a half a bottle of gin everyday,” he told us at dinner, recently. “And he loved caning. He’d call us all into his office, line us up, and tell us to lean over, bottoms up. I knew he enjoyed it. Because he always took a running start. I can still hear the whistle of the wind before the cane hit flesh.” Years later, Paul was also berated by his headmaster for taking it too easy on the younger kids. “When I was a prefect, I was told to cane the 8 and 9 year-olds. It was expected of us, you see? Everyone did it.” So what were the consequences of such arbitrary “punishments” on the young children I came to know as men? “I remember this one boy,” says Paul. “We were in chapel, singing, and he came in a note too soon. He was beaten till he bled, couldn’t sit down for week. The kid graduated and went home. Last I heard, he never left home. He lives with his mother.”
“Praise be that which hardens,” says Neitzsche as Zarathustra. I’m not against a bit of toughening up. Adversity is a great motivator. But how could anyone accept this kind of sadism as civilized behavior? How could parents have thought that it helped shape “Character”; that it helped create the glories of Empire? And what is the difference between the random beating of young boys and cutting off hands as a punishment for stealing? OK. There is a difference, especially for the guy who loses his hand. But I’d say, it’s only a matter of degree. And British men don’t throw women down wells for flirting with strangers. Not anymore than they force them to live in captivity; half blinded by the weight of thick, heavy veils. But I do believe that they much prefer their own company to that of women. Ultimately, these were the men, these public school boys, who colonized the MidEast; who wrote books like the Seven Pillars of Wisdom and Arabian Sands. Men, who like the Arabs, revered the virtues of both male camaraderie and an occasional bit of “recreational” cruelty.
