A Truly Interesting and Challenging Trip

From Dan. He can't post this from Saudi Arabia. His writing starts here:

**Note: I wrote this a few days ago, but am only getting online to post it now. More coming about subsequent experiences that have been variously uplifting, disheartening, unfamiliar, and universal.

Slavery was abolished in the Kingdom in 1962. Several Saudiss have explained this shocking fact to me with bits of mitigating information: it's not like western slavery; they were really members of the family; when King Faysal outlawed slavery, many slaves refused to leave; Islam recognizes it as a virtue to free a slave. Still, slavery was permitted in the Kingdom until 1962, and many of those protestations sound familiar. Last night, it was not hard to notice that the 20 or so wizened men who danced and sang in traditional Arabian song all had dark skin. "Because they are descendents of slaves," explained the Saudi McGill graduate next to me.

Several times already on this trip, I have been surprised to find myself muddled between cultural norms. My philosophical tradition demands relativism, and a skeptical posture with respect to my doubt in the face of a functioning, unfamiliar, ancient social order. But slavery in 1962? The women I have met – not a representative sample – don't feel oppressed, but neither can they travel freely, drive, decide whom to marry, go most places without a male escort to whom they are either married or related, or seek justice when raped. Our hosts say "you see how we truly are, and how unfairly the media represent us, how misunderstood we are." But, in fairness, our extremely circumscribed view of the country, while enriching my understanding of Saudi culture, history, and people, has only added to my knowledge, and dispelled nothing for its transparently selective representation. Incompletely understood, certainly; misunderstood, less so.

The other thing women can't do is vote; a condition that they share with men, the exception being the 30,000 some-odd members of the royal family, who now vote to select the heir to the throne from among that sub-set of their own members who are direct descendants of the great founding King Abd al-Aziz, who ruled for the first half of the 20th century. Two of those members sat with us yesterday evening and patiently and articulately answered questions, including some about what the Kingdom's role should be in Iraq and Israel/Palestine ("We must play one"), the status of women ("I like having a driver") and the status of royalty in the workplace ("We are treated just like everyone else. I was often held up as an example of a hard worker.") Prince Faysal (relation, but distant – there are a lot of Faysals) spent four years in Boston studying business and public policy, and his instantaneous and unblinking answer to a question about the policy priorities of the Kingdom in the coming years was nuanced in its emphasis on education and demographics. He is a real thinker, and a leader. By birth, though, he and his wife have wealth while grinding poverty and political oppression crush the less fortunate, many of whom are the permanent underclass of foreign guest workers. I suppose nothing in that last sentence is different from home. But it is an important distinction that the US constitution strives for an ever more perfect union, whereas the Kingdom's is, literally, the revealed and immutable Sha'aria of Islam.

I feel guilty and ungrateful – another cause of this unexpected ethical confusion. This is like a business trip, and I am learning a great deal within that framework. Our hosts have been as generous, kind, and earnest as any I have ever encountered. Our leaders – a Saudi MIT Sloan student and two of his cousins – have eagerly served as uncommonly skilled links between two worlds that are as uncomfortably bound to one another as any on the planet, and they have been relentlessly focused on our experience and on us. I am purely grateful to them, and I am indeed learning about the Kingdom and the beauty of its people. But to claim, as the professor who is traveling with us did to the Prince and Princess, that this trip is creating 21 ambassadors, is, like many diplomatic expressions heard in the course of bridge-building between cultures that contrast but markets that synergize, either partially disingenuous or mostly expedient, or both. We have differences. The north star of my socio-politics is that those differences can only be bridged by openness, sunshine, discussion, and debate.

The above paragraphs read as judgmental and critical. To the extent that they are, it may be my own impatience and impulsiveness. At best, I offer them not as judgment or criticism, but only as observations that, until they can be discussed and debated and incorporated into a system of justice, are not well understood.

More soon…