JEDDAH, 1 November — Many a myth about Saudi Arabia exploded as Saudi journalists drove home the ground realities to a group of American women in a two-hour lively interaction at Arab News yesterday.
Editor-in-Chief Khaled Al-Maeena led the group at the question and answer session with members of the American Women for International Understanding. The group, here for 10 days at the behest of Marianne Alireza, and facilitated by Tarek Alireza, is seeing the Kingdom for themselves with the idea of taking back their impressions and communicating them to the US public at large.
The group’s itinerary involves some of the well-known tourist sites but is more closely aimed at making people-to-people contacts and exchanging ideas and opinions.
Wednesday featured a seminar on the integration of the Islamic philosophy and its expression through architectural form, hosted by Dr. Sami Angawi, where the spirit of inquiry was very evident.
Yesterday’s session with Al-Maeena and some of his staff at Arab News — Abeer Mishkhas, Rasheed Abou Alsamh, Sarah Abuljadayel and Sara Shaban — proved particularly spirited. Some very probing questions from the well informed visitors covered the full spectrum of issues that interest the US public and fuel debate in the media, ranging from the position of women in the Kingdom to the way in which the Saudi general public saw American people as separate from American government policy.
In keeping with the quickly established open tone of the discussion, the Saudi journalists were able to dispel a few of the myths held dear by some sections of the Western media.
The no-holds-barred session covered the whole gamut of Saudi life, ranging from crime and punishment to news and news coverage with women’s rights and roles thrown in for good measure. The session was marked by occasional disagreements but what emerged at the end was a long bridge of understanding and camaraderie for people to traverse in quest of co-existence.
Marianne Alireza commented at the conclusion of the session: “We have learned a lot here today. People talking to each other face to face and building a relationship that ends up in mutual understanding is what this is all about. We will make sure that it is passed on to our compatriots.” The visitors then visited the Arab News newsroom and met the staff who put the paper together. “It’ll make it so much more real when we read it on the web,” said one of the visitors. “We can say that we’ve been there and met the people. It’s really what we came here for.”