Hajj

The last couple of days have been of public holidays here in Saudi Arabia because of the Hajj. We have been working anyway though; will compensate these days at Christmas, which for obvious reasons isn't celebrated here.

The Hajj is the pilgrimage to Mecca, the largest annual pilgrimage in the world and the fifth pillar of Islam, a moral obligation that every muslim must carry out at least once in their lifetime.

The Hajj takes place from the 7th to the 13th of Dhu al-Hijjah, the 12th month is the Islamic calendar. Because the Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, eleven days shorter than the western Gregorian calendar, the Gregorian date of the Hajj changes every year, shifting eleven days.

Pilgrims join processions of hundreds of thousands of people who converge in Mecca walking couter-clockwise around the Ka'bah (cube shaped building which acts as the Muslim direction of prayer), kissing the black stone in the corner of the Ka'bah, running back and forth between the hills of Al-Safa and Al-Marwah, drinking from the Zamzam well, going to the plains of mount Arafat to stand in vigil and throwing stones in the ritual 'Stoning of the Devil'. The pilgrims then shave their heads, perform a ritual of animal sacrifice and celebrate the three day global festival of Eid al-Adha.

Dubai - Pictures

I leave you some pictures of last weekend trip to Dubai. The last one shows a lot of abandoned cars, abandoned by their foreign owners escaping trial and emprisonment as a result of their failure to meet their financial obligations. In Dubai, if you get into bebt and can't pay you go to prison, there is no concept of bankrupcy. There are more lots like this one, like at the Airport departures. In the background stands the famous Burj Al Arab tower, symbol of Dubai and of its neo-liberalism. Ironic...The river shown in the picture, is also artificial, not more than a channel letting seawater go inland.

Dubai

Last weekend, 3 colleagues and I went to Dubai. Much I had heard and read before about Dubai. Now, so close to Dubai, just 1.30h flying, I had the chance to see in-loco this meant-to-be monument to arab enterprise and western capitalism.

In 1971, the British left and Dubai decided to ally with the 6 surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This coincided with the discovery of large oil fields. Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi, so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the oil revenues to build a city to be a centre of tourism and financial services, attracting cash and talent from across the world. A city seemed to fall out of the sky, they fast-forwarded from the 18th to the 21st century in one single generation.

However, the global financial crisis didn't spare Dubai, as the flow of investments dries up, halting the mad burst of construction, the secrets of Dubai are slowly leaking out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades of credit and ecocide, supression and slavery. All efforts are done to hide the foreign underclass who built the city and are hold in absolute slavery conditions. The ecoligical footprint of Dubai residents is the largest inthe world, there are countless buildings half-finished, westerners imprisoned because they failed their financial obligations (there is no such a concept as bankrupcy), etc. Everything is fake in Dubai, from the artificial islands, the worker's contracts, the water (desalinated), to the palm trees.

In short, the dark and disturbing side of the glitter.

The pictures below show a road in Dubai in 1990, before the madness, and the same road nowadays....

The Golden Age of Arabic Science Exhibition

Yesterday I went to the 'The Golden Age of Arabic Science' exhibition, hosted by the King Saud University in Riyadh. For most westerners, and indeed for many Arabs, the achievements of Arabic-language science from the eighth through the 16th century come as a startling discovery. In mathematics, astronomy, medicine, optics, cartography, physics and chemistry, Arabic science was centuries ahead of Europe. Centers for scientific research emerged in baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Samarkand, Shiraz, Bukhara, Isfahan, Toledo, Cordoba, Granada and Istanbul.

Due to decline, however, little has been left over of this flourishing period.

Prayer Room

This is the islamic prayer room at our office in Riyadh. In Saudi Arabia, by law, offices of a certain size must have a prayer room. It came even in the general requirements of the contract, although most of the people working here are non-muslims.