A LOCAL company has announced plans to invest something in the neighborhood of SR100 million to develop a textiles industry in Saudi Arabia. The company specializes in tailoring shomakh (men’s head dress). The news item can be seen merely as a business story but if looked at in another way, it in fact indicates some kind of development.
It is a fact — and most of us know — that the shomakh is made in England or Switzerland, that prayer mats are imported from China, that our coffee pots — dallah — are also made in China and our incense burners (mabkhra) are made somewhere else by hands other than ours. I must stress here that I am certainly not against trade and exchange, but it does seem that when it comes to things that we like to emphasize as part of our culture and lifestyle, we ought to be able to make them ourselves.
A British friend who is in the Kingdom for the first time, and who is still adjusting to the differences in culture, said that he was astonished when he was told by a Saudi man that the best shomakhs were from England.
His surprise was just another reminder of what we Saudis have lived with — and accepted — as part of our lives.
This reminds me of something that happened in Egypt. A few months ago there was a report of Chinese-made Egyptian pharaonic souvenirs and how Egyptian workers found them to be a threat to their livelihood. But the competition, which was admittedly tough on the Egyptian workers, meant that they would lose part of their income because the Chinese products were cheaper.
True, they were not the real thing but they looked good and they were cheaper. Newspapers quoted an economist as saying that if the workers felt the heat of the competition, then they should work harder on their own goods to make them more affordable or they could just close their workshops.
Very hard, I thought, but I had to admit a certain relief at the idea that at least there is competition. That there are those who actually work and are worried about competition from outside and that there is a sense of pride which was apparent from the workers’ complaints about how the Chinese products don’t look genuine and how the eyes on the Nefertiti statues do not look as they should. The economist added that in this age of globalization, people have to live with the concept and enter the fray if they want to keep their crafts.
Now in Egypt’s case, their answer lies in the competition; they are players in the game, and are fighting to keep their place. In our case, however, we are only consumers of other people’s competitiveness. We do not seem to realize the fact that the competition is taking place in our land; we just sit nonchalantly in the audience with the mentality of a buyer who is choosing from a number of good offers.
Haven’t we been here before? Once again, it is the mentality that is putting us down, the mentality of being a consumer, a person who is offered the goods on silver platters, a person who relies on his wealth to last him forever, and does not feel the need to budge an inch in order to work for himself. Now our concern should be how to wake up from this state. Or are we awake but just unwilling to act? Don’t we feel that we are gradually being made to face a different economic reality?
The whole unemployment issue from which Saudi Arabia is suffering, is proof that our oil wealth only helped us to a certain extent, but now reality has dawned. Finally we are reaching some kind of realization that perhaps Saudis can accept jobs they once thought were beneath them. Honest labor was shunned because Saudis thought that there were others who could do it. Things have at last begun to change, albeit slowly.
