Recreational outlets for women more important than ever

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 4/3/2013

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N THE “hey-this-is-kinda-funny” category of newspaper reporting, the Saudi media published articles recently about Saudi women taking scuba diving lessons in the Red Sea and how they face the usual obstacles to practice their sport.

One reader remarked that there are more important issues facing Saudi women than whether they can scuba dive. Believe me, Dear Reader, I once agreed that the trivialities of swimming and driving cars pale in comparison to equal rights in domestic courts, obtaining employment and having the freedom not to have money a woman earns stolen by lay-about brothers and sons who have a sense of entitlement.

But that was then and this is now. There are no longer baby steps toward equality, but big, leaping strides. And if a woman wants to scuba dive, play football or take a job as a cashier at Danube, then it’s a meaningful step that shouldn’t be minimized by Saudi society.

According to press reports, Saudi women want designated areas to scuba dive in the Red Sea. The Coast Guard bans female divers who don’t have mahrams with them.

Perhaps equally important is the fact that there are few places that women can practice their sport. Further many women divers can’t find boats to take groups because PADI-certified women divers are so few. It makes such trips cost prohibitive.

There is a fair and equitable way for women to participate in recreational activities in a discreet and Islamic way. The answer is to allow women to form clubs that allow them to build memberships to provide private space for women to practice their sport without the interference of local authorities or busybodies who have nothing better to do than to say “no.”

Since safety for women is a the top concern among the men in the family, private clubs provide a way to ensure diving suits, tanks and masks are safe and appropriate for the sport. There are a number of female scuba diving instructors in Saudi Arabia that can provide instructors without indulging in mixing.

In this case, mixing is not really the issue unless the sharks in the water are male. All-female group outings under the supervision of certified female instructors make sense. It does not contradict our Islamic principals.

Despite the best efforts of the Labor Ministry to employ women, there is always this push-pull about what Saudi women should and shouldn’t be doing. For every action from the Labor Ministry that opens jobs for Saudi women, there is a reaction from the self-appointed Saudi society guardians to reduce our access to things that give us an outlet.

Recently, the people-who-know-better-than-me decided that a mall amusement park in Madinah had no purpose. On weekends, this amusement park was open to only women and children. Dads couldn’t even get in.

But our betters decided for reasons known only to them that the amusement park should be closed .

Some municipalities make it difficult for women to open or join fitness centers.

Female football and basketball clubs, which are beginning to become more socially acceptable, are still largely played in secret. Scuba diving and paragliding are just fantasies for many women.

Women and their children need safe and private places for recreation and leisure other than resorts. They need to be free of the mahram requirement as long as it is keeping with our culture and religion. Instead of finding reasons to keep women from enjoying these types of recreational activities, we should encourage it.

At the end of the day one door is opened for women while another is shut. So, if you don’t mind, I will take the little things like the right to scuba dive without a mahram as a major victory. To me, it is one of the more important issues facing women.

There’s no turning back on digital education

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 25/2/2013

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Today I AM scheduled to speak at Effat University about the digital age in education. I don’t pretend to be an expert on such things, but if the University of Newcastle taught me anything it’s that old-school book learning is giving way in a big hurry to digital technologies and new media.

I was earning my doctorate at a time when digital technology began to make headway by leaps and bounds in academia. Not only has digital technologies reshaped our lifestyle, but how we learn. We have shed ourselves of the burden of communicating via written memos and even the telephone by embracing Facebook, Twitter and video teaching and conference calls.

We are no longer confined to the classroom. Distance, time and space are no longer an issue to gain knowledge. Does anybody still use the inter-loan library system where our local library can order you a book from another library hundreds of miles away? Not often. That is how quickly the infrastructure we take for granted as a learning tool has changed as we locate the materials necessary to gain knowledge.

For many of us who researched our papers as much from data on the Internet as books from the shelves of the university library, it was pretty exciting to see that Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) partner to develop its Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) program, which is better known as edX.

The fact that Harvard and MIT have dived into the digital classroom pool says a lot about the future of education. In a nutshell, the program is your basic online course with video linkups, text, exams given on the honor system (and perhaps a few exams in the future in which a video cam will watch you take the exam on your laptop inside Starbucks or your bedroom). Hundreds of thousands of students worldwide can take the same course.

Imagine hundreds of students in a discussion forum during a single course asking and answering questions in real time as the professor and teaching assistants sit back and allow the students to chart the direction of the discussion.

It’s too early to tell whether MOOCs will be a success for Harvard and MIT. But in one early course, 154,763 students registered for a class and half had dropped out before the first problem was addressed. By the end of the course a little more than 7,000 had passed.

That’s not particularly encouraging, but we are talking about MIT, after all, and anything from MIT is going to tough sledding. We also must consider the curiosity factor among students who want to test the waters, but are not necessarily prepared to engage in a virtual classroom.

But the barn door has been left open and there is no way to shut it now. For one, public and private universities are always vying for funding, and there is no way these institutions will pass on the opportunity to tap into more tuition revenue. For another, students will soon take accredited courses from prestigious universities without the expense of travel, accommodation and time by studying from home. As rapidly as we have glommed onto Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as a means of instant shorthand communication, online education will also in a matter of a few short years become the norm. Tablets equipped with a camera will be the next textbook.

Much of this can only be accomplished with corporate sponsorships, and already the leading computer and software corporate leaders are partnering with schools to provide equipment and services. There is a danger there of marrying corporations and education. Giants like Google already play a large part in our public discourse, especially in how we govern free speech issues (Google and YouTube often play the role in what is appropriate speech and what is not. We can look no further than the Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) films and cartoons for such evidence). Having such companies be the engine that drives education may prove problematic, but not enough to dissuade students from enrolling.

Students will look for ways to obtain an education more efficiently, so the demand to transform the way education is delivered and accessed will force universities to respond by incorporating social media — from variations of the Facebook template to standardized video lectures — into the learning process.

Cheaters cheating all the way to the top

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 21/2/2013

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My husband tells me this story: A 13-year-old boy, a childhood friend of my husband, wanted desperately to play in his middle school marching band. He was taking clarinet lessons and his performance ranged from awful to embarrassing. That didn’t deter him from trying out for the band. All his friends were there playing instruments and he wanted to be part of the fun.

When the band instructor gave the boy the bad news that he didn’t make the final cut to join the band, the boy wailed his indignation. He tried so hard, he owned his own musical instrument and he could march up and down the playing field like everybody else.

Why, he asked, couldn’t he march with the band and pretend to play his instrument. Nobody would be the wiser.

The teacher replied, “That’s cheating.”

It was unfair to the other band members who practiced on their instruments and worked so hard to be part of the band to have someone marching beside them who didn’t make the effort, much less the grade, to have the privilege of being a band member.

I thought about this story the other day when I heard about the police raiding a factory that produces fake diplomas and certificates in Al-Qassim. It seems that an expatriate with a Ph.D and his adult daughter were churning out as many as 16,000 phony certificates and diplomas with the appropriate seals and stamps. They would then sell the fakes to lazy people for thousands of Saudi riyals. This guy, who taught at a private Saudi university, was making a fortune off of people who had no moral qualms about cheating their way into better jobs, bigger salaries and bigger egos.

It’s kind of like wearing a fake Rolex. Fake people wear fake watches. The owner refuses to sweat blood to earn enough money to buy an expensive luxury watch, but attempts to come as a guy who did.

Fake higher education certificates and diplomas are nothing new, but Saudi Arabia has been plagued by an influx of these kinds of documents in recent years. The reason is fairly obvious. The only way to advance in a job where most of the senior managers have held on to their jobs for 20 years and have no intention of leaving is to be highly educated. That requires a master’s degree or a doctorate.

But that means actually attending a university, taking classes, performing research and defending your work in front of a tough panel of professors. But why spend four or five years on a postgraduate degree when a few thousand Saudi riyals will buy you the piece of paper that gives you a title you don’t deserve? Some people would pay up to SR 21,000 for a fake document.

Last month the Ministry of Higher Education began a verification process to weed out phony degrees held by government employees. The focus was to stop individuals from securing government jobs without the proper education. The ministry has begun demanding that all government departments have employees submit original postgraduate certificates that can be verified.

This will help identify the cheaters in government jobs, but the private sector, which offers much more lucrative salaries, has not caught on. On the surface, possessing a fake degree appears to be a victimless crime, but its harmful impact has a far reach.

Like the boy who wanted to be in a marching band but couldn’t play a musical instrument, the fake degree holder is occupying space that belongs to an individual who worked hard for his degree. The faker is taking away a job from a qualified worker. The faker is stealing money — a salary he does not deserve — from his employer. He cheated his way into a job that rightfully belonged to somebody else and prevented that person’s family to enjoy a better lifestyle.

We live in a world in which many people think nothing of taking shortcuts to advance their career and make more money. It’s haram, pure and simple, and one doesn’t need to be Muslim to understand that stealing comes in all different forms. But for Saudis who engage in this kind of behavior, there should be a special shame for them.

Most unhygienic places in the Kingdom

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 18/2/2013

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Beauty salons in Saudi Arabia are probably one of the biggest thriving businesses in the Kingdom, and is without question the least regulated.

So it comes as a great surprise to me that Saudi women, who have a reputation for having a fetish for cleanliness, would patronize establishments that often don’t pay close attention to hygiene.

Some years ago I went to a local beauty salon and the beautician used a body sponge to apply some cosmetics, and then proceeded to use it on herself, including her armpits. When I told her that I wanted clean sponges from a sealed packet, she was insulted because I had the audacity to tell her how to do her job. Apparently no customer felt the need to tell her that only fresh appliqué should be used on patrons.

I am not condemning all beauty salons. There are many fine, professional places that do fine work to appeal to a woman’s vanity. These clean and professional shops are owned by people who have trained outside Saudi Arabia and know what they are doing. But there are plenty of shops in the Kingdom that breed bacteria.

I have been to more than a few shops in which lipstick from the same tube and body care tools are given to multiple customers. Brushes are not washed and combs are not cleaned for each patron who walks through the door.

Shops not regulated by the Ministry of Health pose unnecessary health dangers to women. Consider that between January 1995 and December 2005, nearly 25,000 cases of Hepatitis C have been reported in Saudi Arabia. About 77 percent of those cases involved Saudis. The number of cases peaked in 2002 at 4,167 and leveled off in 2005 to 2,674 cases. According to Tariq Ahmed Madani’s 2007 report for the Department of Medicine at the King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, most of these cases were attributed to intravenous drug use or faulty blood transfusions.

I can’t say that any of these cases originated in unclean beauty salons, but the potential for quickly spreading bacteria can be found in untested beauty products sold in unhygienic shops.

For example, there are some creams designed to lighten the skin that contain high levels of cortisone. It shouldn’t be used on a wide area of the body and not to be used for a long period of time. However, many customers and beauticians violate these cautions, which causes acne and creating different shades of pigmentation on the skin. Imagine if these types of creams are applied on the skin with acne and then the application sponges are used on different customers.

At the moment, beauty shops are not held responsible for spreading illness among patrons. Instead, the Ministry of Health should be conducting inspections of shops to enforce more hygienic and healthy procedures.

I recall my early stay in England when I went to the Boots Pharmacy. There was an open tube of lipstick on the shelf, which was available to customers for testing. I was about to apply the lipstick to my lips when a clerk ran up to me and told me that for the sake of my own health, she could not permit me to apply it to my lips. “We can’t guarantee this lipstick has not be infected,” she said.

She was keen to teach me simple health procedures, which does not happen in Saudi Arabia. When I go to a cosmetics counter in the mall, I often see women apply lipstick and makeup to their faces that has already been open and used by other customers instead of applying them to their hand. At the big department stores in the UK, the cosmetics clerk makes it a point to use sterilizers in front of their customers.

It’s a simple process to regulate cosmetic products and the beauty salons and mall shops that sell and demonstrate them for customers. Minor medical problems like acne and the more serious infections like Hepatitis C and B can be avoided. But an unchecked cosmetics industry will only contribute more health problems among women in Saudi Arabia.

Academic brain drain: A challenge

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 14/2/2013

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Saudi Arabia has done a remarkable job of beefing up the health care, technology and sciences profession by attracting top-notch talent from around the world.

The Ministry of Health, for example, has innumerable projects to vastly expand medical facilities throughout the Kingdom. And the King Abdullah Foreign Scholarship Program has sent thousands of Saudi men and women abroad to earn postgraduate degrees with the expectation that they will return to serve their country.

These are the right steps to securing a better future for the next generation of Saudis with a knowledge-based society. No longer is oil the cure-all for whatever ails us now. And oil is certainly no panacea for a secure economic future. It’s indeed far-sighted for the Saudi government to invest in its youth.

But according to a 2009 study by Ameerah Yousef Mansour called Factors Affecting Locational Decisions of Saudi Health Care Professionals, only 21.4 percent of all physicians, including dentists, were Saudis. Saudis accounted for only 19.5 percent of nurses and 45.4 percent of the health care technical staff were Saudis. This is just a small sampling of one segment of the work force of the low numbers of Saudis engaged in high-caliber professions.

It’s the job of Saudi universities to improve those numbers and rely less on foreign labor.

Yet hidebound institutions have not embraced the concept of helping the king’s vision of developing a knowledge-based society. Specifically, colleges and universities remain locked in a rigid hierarchy that squelches the pursuit of greater knowledge.

Saudi academia is awash in internal politics, fear, apathy and jealously, which stifles intellectual growth. Bureaucracy and unnecessary cost cutting have sapped the motivation of many promising academics.

While the Ministry of Higher Education sends students abroad with high hopes, those very same students who choose a career in academics are coming home to an environment that does not encourage research. Without published research, an academic has few opportunities for career advancement. Without career advancement there are no higher salaries and few academic achievements that make the university professor marketable to other employers.

In Saudi Arabia, the salary of an assistant professor averages almost SR 19,000 monthly. There often is no accommodation allowance. The transportation allowance may pay for a bicycle. As rents continue to rise in urban areas and drivers demand higher salaries, the outlay for those two expenses alone reduces a female professor’s salary by nearly half.

There once was a time when Saudi universities paid a premium for a Saudi possessing a doctorate. But in recent years, some universities have been on a cost-cutting spree. The Ministry of Higher Education is still debating whether to take away extra compensation for computer literacy. Extra pay for rare skills, such as earning a Ph.D., might soon disappear. It makes little sense to make budgetary cuts when the Kingdom’s education budget has a surplus of funds.

The payments cuts, although small in the grand scheme of things, chip away at a professor’s self-worth. The era of coveting a Saudi academic with a doctorate no longer exists. They are no longer special because any Ph.D holder is expected to teach. Administrators want to see tangible results immediately by gauging student progress on a week-to-week basis, instead of investing in long-term commitments to achieve long-term goals.

In fact, classroom hours increase to the point that few doctorate holders have the time to pursue the goals that motivated them to become Ph.D holders in the first place: research.

Even in academic circles the idea of research is viewed with suspicion, as if it’s not really work. If you are not visibly teaching, then you are not doing anything constructive.

The great danger in this is we waste the talents of doctorate holders. University administrators insist they remain in the classroom, taking them away from research that allows them to develop policies that lead to better academic programs that help Saudis become more competitive in the global workplace.

If administrators deny academics the ability to conduct research to produce a better educational environment, those academics will go elsewhere. Already, some Saudi women graduating from Western universities are deciding that Saudi Arabia does not offer a healthy academic or work environment. Part of the reason is the closed nature of Saudi society, but also because universities are steeped in traditions that were important to learning 20 years ago, but only serve as obstacles to the growing thirst for knowledge among young Saudis today.

Saudi postgraduate students are not satisfied to return to Saudi Arabia to be snowed under heavy classroom hour requirements that all but eliminate any opportunity to pursue research and attend conferences to exchange information and be exposed to other ideas. They have been to American, European and East Asian universities and experienced academic freedom.

A friend of mind recently completed his Ph.D and returned to the United Arab Emirates with a job paying 33,000 dirhams, more than one-third higher than the top salary tier of a similar position in Saudi Arabia.

Saudis are loyal to the king’s vision to develop the Saudi brain trust to secure the country’s future. But if universities can’t get with the game plan, then another country’s gain of a Saudi academic is our country’s loss.

No way to treat the elderly

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 11/2/2013
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The other day a young woman took her grandfather to a mental hospital because he was unresponsive and didn’t seem to know his family.
Hospital personnel determined the 70-year-old man was not mentally ill but suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. A mental institution was no place for a person with Alzheimer’s and the admitting doctors refused to take him because the facility was ill-equipped to handle his illness. The daughter disappeared, but the hospital referred the man to another medical facility, which also refused to admit for the same reasons.
It appears that care for this poor man will not come soon. He was taken to a police station where he was fed and apparently given shelter.
Now is this any way to treat our elders?
No, of course not. But Saudi Arabia’s health care has not kept pace with the rapidly changing face of Saudi society. Our public services, or should I say lack of public services, are predicated on the family. Saudi families have long prided themselves on taking care of the elderly and infirm. When extended family members find themselves in trouble, it wasn’t uncommon for relatives to take them in.
Yet we as a society are rapidly losing these fundamental characteristics once found in families. Many families are now fractured. Divorce, unemployment, domestic abuse, our excessive reliance on social media, satellite television and video games have made Saudi families more isolated than ever while at the same time leaving less time to care for family members who need help the most.
Saudis have not caught on to the new family dynamic. As a consequence the government is not prepared to deal with families that are unwilling or unable to care for the elderly and the sick in their own home.
Granted, the Saudi population of people over the age of 64 is just 3 percent, but the life expectancy of the average Saudi man is 72.4 years old and for woman 76.5 years old. This is a dramatic increase from the average life expectancy of 50 in 1974. We have also seen an increase in the elderly population jump 44.5 percent in 2004 from 1992. By 2030, we can expect an 2.5 million Saudis over the age of 65 with a life expectancy of about 80 years, according to King Saud University.
The simple facts are the elderly will be a burden on families as their parents and grandparents live longer but also have more health issues.
It is the duty and blessing of every Muslim to care for their parents and Islam stresses family support for the old, but changes in societal behavior have raised the issue that many families no longer have the wherewithal to provide around-the-clock care for a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s or is bed-ridden with other afflictions. The medical care for the old is too complex, but is expected to be carried out by family members without any significant training.
But there is no place to go for help. Unlike in other countries, Saudi Arabia has no comprehensive health care facilities that can take in the elderly. Convalescent hospitals for the elderly, nursing homes and long-term geriatric care facilities are few.
There are only 10 social centers serving less than 2,000 elderly people in the entire country, according to KSU’s 2008 study. Ninety percent of those residents have no families and no other shelter.
Accurate data is hard to come by to determine whether the lot of an old person’s life has improved in the five years since the study was conducted.
What we do know is that the mental hospital staff did not know where to send the 70-year-old Alzheimer’s victim. The idea that a police station to house and feed the old fellow was the only alternative indicates that our government agencies have not responded to this growing necessity to provide the proper care. We can expect more examples of abandoned old people as the burden becomes too great for Saudi families.

Need to prevent child abuse

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 7/2/2013

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THE most recent spate of child abuse cases that attracted considerable attention in social media outlets points to a growing frustration among Saudis about the rising number of reported incidents of violence against children in our society.

The case of a man accused of raping and murdering his five-year-old daughter and the horrific account of the systemic and gruesome violence against a nine-year-old boy should be evidence alone that we are not doing enough to protect our children.

A primary component of our society is that the family’s privacy must be protected. But privacy in the extreme does not help build a strong society and privacy can’t stand in the way of monitoring child abuse by the Ministry of Social Affairs.

We live in an era of heightened anxiety and stress. More than 60 percent of Saudis do not have their own home. Many Saudis are coping with unemployment. The cost of living continues to rise and the traffic in urban areas is almost unbearable. The stress on young parents is especially difficult.

According to Aliah Al-Fareed of the National Human Rights Commission, a significant percentage of Saudi wives are subject to violence by their husbands. A high percentage of those women are between the ages of 18 and 29. However, most of those women never went to the police.

Sanaa Al-Hwaily, a Saudi psychologist with the Ro’ea Center for Social Studies, reported that 45 percent of all Saudi children have been subjected to violence. In 2011, the center registered 500 cases of violence against children, a huge leap from 292 registered cases in 2010. She expects the numbers to increase in 2013.

The fallout from all of this is that often young children become scapegoats for their parents’ problems. It’s almost expected that reported child abuse cases increase in these difficult times. By the same token, it’s necessary that the Saudi government steps in and takes strict measures against child abusers by making it easier to report people who commit violence.

Rather than valuing privacy to the extent that it puts a child in danger, Saudi Arabia needs to consider adopting strategies from other countries that will enhance safety. In addition to an awareness campaign, the Ministry of Education should develop laws that require teachers to report suspected abuses of children to police. Foster family programs, which are nonexistent in Saudi Arabia, but commonplace in many other countries, would take abused children out of shelters and into a loving home environment. Shelters are not the only solution to protecting children. Often these shelters serve more or less as warehouses since the emotional wellbeing of the children is not a priority.

Police departments need to resist taking a passive stance in the name of privacy by actively investigating child abuse cases. In fact, law agencies must encourage reporting abuse.

We have a family in our apartment building in which the parents are constantly fighting. Often loud shouting matches go on through the night and early morning. The young children are subject to verbal abuse. Whether they are physical abused is unknown, but it usually doesn’t take long for physical violence to follow verbal violence.

Yet the police won’t investigate such cases because they need a complaint from a family member. Never mind that most victims of domestic violence will not report their abuse to authorities because they fear reprisals.

I remember when I was a child a family in my neighborhood was physically abused by the father. The screams of the mother and the children could be heard throughout the neighborhood. When the screams started, my parents would take all the children inside the house to make sure that we would not hear those screams.

The abuse became so bad that my father finally went to their house with the imam of our mosque and two other men and explained to the man who abused his wife and children that his behavior was un-Islamic in the worse way. I don’t know whether the abuse stopped after that day, but the screams did. We never heard the abuse again.

But Saudi families live isolated lives now and there are few neighbors willing to confront a child abuser about his crimes.

To address this problem, female police officers would help solve the issue of abuse victims reluctant to file complaints. Wives and mothers would feel more secure walking into a police station to file a complaint to a woman police officer.

Saudi Arabia has Naif Arab University for Security Sciences that requires police officers to attend for certification. Women attend this university to become prison guards in female prisons. There is no reason why women police officers can’t be trained with an emphasis on handling domestic abuse cases. Police departments can comply with Shariah by providing separate entrances for female officers and for women who require police services.

We can no longer hide behind our right to privacy when a child’s life is in danger. If the life of one of our neighbors is threatened and we do nothing, what does that say about us?

The lesson Rihan taught me

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 4/2/2013

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WHEN I WAS 6 years old I had a pet goat named Rihan. He was my best friend.

Rihan was the offspring of goats that belonged to my grandmother who lived not far from my family in Madinah. She gave me Rihan while my cousin received another goat.

Rihan was all mine, which meant that he was my responsibility. This is no small thing for a 6-year-old. I had to learn how to feed it, take care of its needs and make sure he had all the attention that he deserved. He was my family. I was his mother and he was my son. I raised him since he was a baby still breastfeeding from his mother.

At my house we had a huge backyard. I had my dad build a small barn to give him shelter in the corner of the yard where I grew some vegetables. During the summer my entire family slept outdoors and Rihan used to sleep under my bed. During the day and evenings we’d play in the backyard. I had a bicycle and since my parents didn’t allow me to play in the streets, I rode my bike in the big backyard with Rihan following me wherever I went.

We both loved fig rolls and Rihan followed me around always demanding more. I would eat half a fig roll and he would eat the other. He refused to stop following me until the whole package was empty.

Every other day I gave my baby a bath. He was one fat, happy and fluffy goat. For more than a year, I did little but play and care for my little buddy, whom I regarded as a family member.

Around this time my mother, who was never properly educated, had finished primary school through adult education. This was an exciting moment for the family and we decided to throw a big party and invite the extended family.

I don’t remember whose idea it was to buy Rihan from me, but my dad ultimately offered SR 200 for him. Now, SR 200 is a lot of money for a little kid, but I somehow it didn’t feel right to sell my friend. I wasn’t convinced this was the right decision, but the adults in the family put pressure on me and I didn’t want to disappoint them.

On the day of the party, my dad loaded Rihan into the back of his truck. I insisted that I go with him. I hopped into the bed of the truck and wrapped my arms around Rihan neck. I felt then, as I do now, that he knew what lay ahead for him. I tried to feed him, but he refused to take the food. I continued to hug him and nuzzle his neck, but he seemed frightened. He was not his playful self.

I had changed my mind about giving up Rihan, but it was too late to turn back. In the desert, where my family had set up a big camping site, my dad took Rihan from the truck to behind a tree. Rihan was crying. I was crying. I heard him scream while my dad slit his throat.

I cried my eyes out that day, and then fell into a deep sleep. Sometime later in the day, my mom and dad woke me up and told me to come for dinner. I didn’t want to eat, but they insisted. I sat on the ground in front of the lavish meal and ate the meat. I then threw up.

My parents offered me a new goat since my grandmother had another batch born. I refused the offer.

A goat is a goat, but in a child’s eyes that goat is something entirely different. A pet, yes, but often another member of the family. Pets teach children responsibility, but it also teaches a child love.

I was put in a position to make a decision that I was entirely unprepared to take, but I can’t really blame my parents for what happened. Adults often do not realize the importance children attach to animals and how vital animals are in a child’s small world.

When I was 12 years old, our family moved to another apartment. I owned a cat at that time, and my mother told me I couldn’t take it to our new home. I left the cat behind with regret, but it didn’t hurt the way I had lost Rihan because I always felt that I was a party to his death and suffered guilt as a consequence.

My brother, who lives in the United States, recently complained to me that my 4-year-old niece is cluttering up their apartment with too many belongings. He sent me a photo of my niece’s dolls, clothing and toys piled high in the corner of her bedroom. He asked whether he should move the stuff to the closet and throw out the worthless things.

Absolutely not, I said. They were her things and her world. It was not a decision an adult should make because he had no idea what importance she attached to certain things. Only she would know, and as a preschooler she was not likely to share with her parents what she considered her most cherished possessions.

My niece now begs my brother for a cat. He refused her, but I’m thinking that when she returns to Saudi Arabia, her aunt might just get her that cat.

I owe it to the memory of Rihan.

Youths are calling: Are we listening?

The column appeared originally in Arab News dated 31/1/2013

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There is a perception inside Saudi Arabia and abroad that Saudi youths are idle, humorless and disengaged from the political and societal movements in their country.

About 10 years ago my circle of friend had often complained about some men and women in our own generation whose main concern was less about developing a work ethic and becoming active in the community and more about spending time smoking sheesha, sipping coffee at outdoor cafes and cruising the Corniche.

Those are some of the Saudis of my generation that got caught between the oil boom of the 1970s and what was once called dot.com boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Perhaps they can best be described as Saudi Arabia’s lost generation.

Whatever path the now 40-somethings have taken is now set in stone. They have chosen their future. However, the new generation is on the cusp of dramatic change in our society. They are a far different lot. They have taken notice of their country’s strengths and failings and have turned to social media to comment. They are a generation of observers with a dynamic take on the world they inhabit.

The medium they are using is YouTube in which comedy programming is used to tackle social phenomenon in a startling way. Aish el ee, or “What is that?” is a comedy program staffed by young Saudi men. It is the top show watched throughout the Arab world because it tackles social issues in a funny way.

Sahi, or “Awake” takes on more topical issues like the fatal Jeddah floods and the work of the Jeddah municipality. Sahi is not afraid to highlight ministries that fail to complete projects. These programs are low-budget affairs recorded by Saudis in a small one-room studio. Each program runs about 10 to 15 minutes.

Ala Attair is another TV program. Commentators pick up news stories from the Arabic press and write comedy sketches that lampoon social norms, not unlike the US program, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” For example, one segment discusses how drivers control women’s lives. Another may offer tips to women who need a mahram to help them conduct business. Ala Attair’s solution is to have women carrying around a male doll dressed in a thobe that is kept in a purse for emergencies.

Some programs are interspersed with other, more serious segments that include interviews with Saudis in malls. One Saudi, for example, complained to the camera that, “I have done everything … I studied hard, graduated with high marks and went to all the companies (for a job) … they accuse us of being lazy and being careless (but) I am ready, I just want a chance.”

Remarkably, some of these programs attract as many as 300 million viewers across the Middle East. The comments are often as funny as the programs and provide a window into young Saudis’ attitudes about their country, their wants and needs, and disappointments.

More important than simply entertainment, the Saudi government can learn a great deal about what young people think, especially as ministries prepare to introduce new regulations that affect society in general or more specific issues like employment. Their comedic commentaries are a constructive way to express disappointment without being confrontational.

After all, the median age of Saudis is 25 years old with nearly 30 percent under the age of 14. This should give the Saudis of my generation and my parents’ generation pause to consider that Saudis under the age of 30 are largely unrepresented in the decision-making process of the government. Public dialogue is not available to them and there are no clubs or common gathering places, other than sheesha parlors, that allow them to express ideas. It’s as if they don’t exist. Yet they are the backbone of our society. Frankly, it’s negligent to ignore this segment of society.

Behind the jokes is a real earnestness among Saudis to do the right thing for their country. They obviously love Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah and are true patriots. That’s why these programs have drawn a loyal following among millions of young people.

It’s in Saudi Arabia’s best interest to pay attention to them.