Houston to Riyadh: Islamic and Ethnic Lessons

Mohammed  

Mohammed is one of the staff at SABIC Americas in Houston, and he was very helpful in securing my Saudi visa last May in anticipation of centers in Riyadh later that month. We had lunch together in Houston on May 19th 2005, after I finished my Shell program, and he was a pleasant, knowledgeable man.

I learned more about Islam from him:

• Prophets Muhammad, Moses and Jesus all descended from the last (grand) father. I forget which two were brothers, sons of Ismail – or which one was the cousin.

• Muhammad (PBUH) traveled to Jerusalem and ascended to Heaven, just as Hesham Hassaballa noted.

• Apparently Moses had already died by the time of Muhammad’s revelation, so Moses could not necessarily have advised Muhammad to push back on God regarding the number of prayers Muslims had to do each day.

Me, with Herdie, Laure and Rolf, King Abdulaziz Historic Centre, in Riyadh (2005)

Mumtaz 

Mumtaz was the SABIC staff, who picked me up from King Khaled Airport in Riyadh on May 20th and drove me to the Four Seasons Hotel. He’s Pakistani but looked very Saudi in his customary thobe and ghutra.

I told him about how some Aramco participants were convinced that I was a Hejazi Saudi.  Mumtaz could see what they saw, and he offered more information that I found very interesting:

• Apparently there were people, maybe an ethnic group, from the Central Asian part of Russia called the Boharis.

• The Boharis settled in the Hejaz region (Western Province of Saudi Arabia), and I have some of their features.

Mumtaz mentioned that it was very tough to get a job in Pakistan. It’s a little better in Saudi Arabia, though it’s still not all that easy. I gathered from what he was saying that it was due to his being a foreigner.

I’m slowly learning and appreciating the great ethnic diversity in Saudi Arabia. If I recall correctly, there are over 200 ethnicities within Aramco alone.  The greatest diversity apparently resides in the Western Province, where ethnic groups hail from Africa and Asia.

Riyadh

Riyadh, in the Central Province, is the most conservative, and I would guess the least diverse – or, perhaps as Mumtaz is facing, the least open to different ethnicities.

Riyadh looks to be a sprawling city, with only a couple of tall buildings – the Four Seasons Hotel being one of them, apparently owned by one of the Princes. There’s another hotel, no where near as tall as the Four Seasons, that has an interesting cone-like structure. It, too, is owned by a Prince.

Riyadh houses about 4.5 million people, and talk about sprawling:  it’s 100 x 75 square kilometers.