Cultural Origins

I had an interesting time the other day with one of our new Saudi pilots. This is the same guy I talked about previously who grew up in Kuwait and experienced the Gulf War first hand. He called me up and offered to take me into town to get something to eat. We had talked earlier about my desire to experience authentic Arabic food, so he took me to a restaurant called Al-Macbus. We tried to get there before prayer time, but we were a bit late so the doors were closed. (Apparently if you get in and are served before prayer time, you can stay there and finish eating until prayer is over. All doors are closed and all work stops during prayer time, which happens 5 times a day.) Anyway, since we got there too late he decided to show me the construction of this house he plans on renting with his brother. It wasn’t that far away, so we soon found it, and he gave me the tour. The walls were all cinder block smoothed over with cement. Wood was sparse, but used for a few things like door frames and molding. Otherwise all the decorative aspects of the walls and floor etc, was done with tile and ornate stone. It was two stories, the bottom floor having two “living rooms” and two “dining rooms” (one set being for “outside guests” and one set for family). The second floor had four bedrooms, and a few bathrooms. The flat rooftop also had plenty of room and could easily be also used for social gathering as it was very spacious and had an 8 foot wall all around it giving it privacy. The only covered area on the roof was a maid’s (or servant’s) quarters at one end. It was almost exactly like I had envisioned houses looking like in biblical times. It seemed all the houses in the neighborhood had this sort of layout. None of them were very colorful, mostly variations of beige. The classiness of each was mostly demonstrated in the ornate texture of the walls. One house we passed had some bright yellow trim. Bander said that even though it was eye catching, the owner would probably have to repaint it every year. The constant sand-storms make anything colorful quickly look grungy around here so most people settle with beige or grey.

We then went back to the restaurant and had quite the cultural experience. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at when I first walked in. There were no tables, only cubicles about 6 feet squared with three foot walls surrounding each, topped by another foot and a half of frosted glass. The aisles in between each cubicle had sandals on the floor, and inside were men sitting barefoot on carpeted floors with cushions lining the walls to lean against, and a few other cushions to lean on. People ate with their hands out of large metal wok-like dishes that sat on disposable pieces of plastic. Everyone sat in relative privacy (unless someone intentionally looked over their cubical walls at them). I was a little more awkward than everyone else as I had to remove my shoes with my hands – since I had shoes with shoelaces, then borrow Bander’s sandals to go wash my hands before and after our meal. Everyone else just slipped on and off their sandals without using their hands every time they went in and out of their cubicles. After a very spicy soup (that was eaten with a plastic spoon) our dishes were mostly rice with about a half a chicken in the middle. Besides a few chilies and some onion, there really wasn’t much in the way of vegetables. The rice was pretty greasy and there was a white sauce to put on the rice to help make it more pasty and add flavor. At the bottom of one of the dishes was a sort of flat bread that was soaking wet with the sauce the rice had been cooked with. We shared each dish “community-style” only eating with our right hands. I had learned how to eat with my hands a few months ago with my Filipino friends, but Bander helped me refine my skills a bit, laughing at my exclusive use of fingers and resistance to get my whole hand “dirty”. He said, “You’ll never get it right until you use your whole hand”. Eventually I figured out that I had to grab the food I wanted and squeeze it in the palm of my hand until it all stuck together. Then, without leaning forward, or tipping my head back, I was to scoop my newly formed ball of food in my mouth with the back of my thumb. It wasn’t long and Bander was calling me a pro.

Bander told me that despite the Western influence in Kuwait, he had grown up almost exclusively eating on the floor with his hands. He really didn’t learn how to use silverware until after he graduated from high school and went to the U.S. for college. He said that even though he loved the American culture, there were times he would get very homesick, and long for his family, especially their tradition of eating together on the floor. He said that he would more than likely eat on the floor when he had a family of his own, no matter where he ended up. He said that more and more people in Kuwait and Saudi are using tables and have adopted many other Western practices, but you will still find a large percentage that prefer the “old ways”. Even among the members of his family that have now grown up there is a 50-50 split. I asked him if he was close to his family, and he said “very”. He said there isn’t a week that goes by that he doesn’t talk to his parents and all of his nine brothers and sisters. He seemed very proud of this. He said, that was partly why he and his brother were planning on renting such a large house. He envisioned constantly having some, if not sometimes all his extended family over to visit, and it was very important to him to be able to house them and make them feel comfortable.

It’s hard to express the way I feel about being out here in the midst of such a rich blending of cultures. In some strange way, learning about others seems to help me understand myself. Where did I get this “work ethic” and is it really a good thing? Why do my relationships with family and friends seem so shallow and so poorly maintained? What is this tension I feel between scientific rationalism and faith? I’ve been reading a book I saved from college called “History Through the Eyes of Faith” by Ronald A. Wells, that I’ve enjoyed very much. It explained how our Western ideology traces its “radical individualism” all the way back to classic Greco-Roman philosophy. Much of what prompted the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution comes from the ancient Hellenistic philosophy that “man is the measure of all things” (p17). At first, we were much like the Middle East is now with a strong sense of community and a sense of obligation to religious authority. The end of the Middle Ages was marked by a rapidly growing distrust in established religious authority culminating in a reawakening of classical thought. Man was his own priest, according to Luther, and he didn’t need another person to understand the bible. Although there were many positive aspects to the Protestant movement, the continued trend of Western thinking evolved from a God centered world-view to a man-centered one, and eventually the “essence of human nature” was believed not to be “that humankind was created, but that humans create” (p170). Another subtle change was from the Christian “expectation for a perfect life in heaven” that was eventually “secularized and promised on earth” (p172). This spawned a ruthless, unchecked form of capitalism that saw plenty of “progress” but at the expense of community. When people saw their own ability to pursue happiness (a concept that made it all the way into the American Declaration of Independence) they began to strive for their own good and not for the good of the community. This caused them to feel great alienation, something Karl Marx tried hard to fix, so far unsuccessfully, with socialism.

So, I think it’s been good for me to understand who I am and what my culture and world view has been influenced by as I compare myself to my friends here in the Middle East. There is a lot to appreciate and learn from out here, and I’m grateful for the time I have to process it all.