On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future by Karen Elliott House

Author:Karen Elliott House [House, Karen Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, History, Political Science, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural, World, Middle East, Middle Eastern
ISBN: 9780307960993
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2012-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Plans, Paralysis, and Poverty

Be not like the hypocrite who, when he talks, tells lies; when he makes a promise, he breaks it; and when he is trusted, he proves dishonest.

—PROPHET MUHAMMAD, SAHIH BUKHARI, VOL. 1, BK. 2, NO. 32

Land at any Saudi airport and proceed to baggage claim. The men offering to handle your luggage are from Bangladesh, India, or Pakistan. Exit the airport for a taxi, and your driver almost surely is Pakistani. Arrive at your hotel, and the guard who performs the obligatory security check on the taxi’s trunk is probably from Yemen. The doorman who greets you is Pakistani, and the smiling men behind the check-in desk are Lebanese. The waiter offering coffee in the lobby is Filipino, as are many of the men who will clean your room. So you have been in Saudi Arabia for more than an hour and, except at passport control, have yet to encounter a Saudi.

One of every three people in Saudi Arabia is a foreigner. Two out of every three people with a job of any sort are foreign. And in Saudi Arabia’s anemic private sector, fully nine out of ten people holding jobs are non-Saudi. To the extent that there is enterprise in the kingdom, it is almost entirely imported.

Visit any middle-class Saudi home, and you are likely to see one or more young men of the family, some educated and some not, hanging around, with little prospect and often little interest in finding a job. Second, you are even more likely to see a number of young women of the family, almost surely better educated and more ambitious, who are unable to enter a workforce that offers them precious few opportunities. Third, the family is likely to employ one or more foreigners to do much of the work within the household and to provide almost every service required in daily life, from a ride in a taxi, to tutoring for children, to shopping at a department store.

Saudi Arabia, in short, is a society in which all too many men do not want to work at jobs for which they are qualified; in which women by and large aren’t allowed to work; and in which, as a result, most of the work is done by foreigners—Pakistanis, Indians, Filipinos, Bangladeshis, and others—who compose the a majority of the labor force. Most of these 8.5 million foreigners are treated as second-class citizens; their lives are controlled by a sponsoring employer, who must give permission for them to change employment. Essentially they are indentured servants for the period of their contracts.

On the surface, the entire kingdom functions like a grand hotel. Saudi citizens check in at birth, remain isolated in their rooms, take little pride in caring for their surroundings, and merely demand the services provided by the hotel’s foreign employees, who are paid pitifully low salaries from the government’s bountiful oil revenue. After all, one in every four barrels of oil sold on the world market comes from Saudi Arabia.

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