Over the years, Saudi society has seen the introduction of many previously unknown customs and practices. One that is very strange to me is the placing of enormous notices in newspapers following the death of an important or prominent person.
Are such notices driven by compassion or sympathy for the bereaved? As a matter of fact, the notice aims to kill two birds with one stone. The first is to please the family of the deceased and the second is for those whose names appear in the notice to be associated with an important person. Condolence gatherings are one of our society’s strangest scenes.
Huge crowds — who cause unnecessary traffic congestion — arrive at the house of the deceased. Most of them do not know the person well and in fact, they would not bother to attend a similar gathering for someone not important or well known.
People have begun to look at their social duty and obligations in terms of wealth and personal benefit. It would be much better to donate the money spent for a notice in a newspaper to a charity in memory of the deceased. This would certainly be a good thing to do — except for the newspapers, which of course make immense profits from those large notices.
Instead of producing empty compliments and pointless flattery, why not give some benefit to the poor? The deceased could be as well served by a short factual obituary.
The strange thing is that many of those who pay large sums on the notices are far from generous when it comes to helping the poor. What is stranger is these people delay going to — or do not even attend — the condolence gatherings of their relatives or friends because they are insignificant socially and have left nothing beyond their dignity and a good name. When an important person dies, however, these people race to have their names included in the newspaper and perhaps even attend the burial.
I remember an old story of an entire village attending the funeral of an important judge’s secretary. When the judge himself died, few bothered to bestir themselves since the secretary was the person who had made the decisions and laid the petitions and documents on the judge’s desk. This incident has great validity in our world today and it shows us, if we needed showing, how omnipresent is man’s desire to be ostentatious and how prevalent is hypocrisy.
