Beauty Pageant: Saudi Arabia Style
Apr 30th, 2007 | Comments
During my brief stint as a journalist with the Saudi Gazette at Riyadh in the late 1970s, my favourite question to the Saudis from different walks of life was: “What would you do if, suppose, your country runs out of oil?”
The general refrain then was something like this: “We are not prisoners to our present lifestyle. God has been kind. If He wishes otherwise…we would still thank him and return to our old ways…the Bedouin life and the camels… ”
I was reminded of this when I read an interesting Reuters story by Andrew Hammond today: “The legs are long, the eyes are big, the bodies curvaceous.
“This week, the Qahtani tribe of western Saudi Arabia has been welcoming entrants to its Mazayen al-Ibl competition, a parade of the ‘most beautiful camels’ in the desolate desert region of Guwei’iyya, 120 km (75 miles) west of Riyadh.
” ‘In Lebanon they have Miss Lebanon,’ jokes Walid, moderator of the competition’s Web site. ‘Here we have Miss Camel.’
“While tremendous oil wealth has brought rapid modernization to the desert state of Saudi Arabia, the camel remains celebrated as a symbol of the traditional nomadic lifestyle of Bedouin Arabs.
“Throughout history camels have served multiple purposes as food, friend, transport and war machine. They were key to the Arab conquests of the Middle East and North Africa nearly 1,400 years ago that brought Islam to the world…”
More here…
Here are my earlier posts on Saudi Arabia…Please click here…
