Dr. Abdullah Al-Fawzan, a guest on a recent radio program, gave some alarming figures about the social problems plaguing our society.
The statistics are terrifying and they suggest a serious threat to the very existence of the family and our traditional definition of Saudi society.
I wish the figures could be made available to every house so that we could all become aware of the bitter reality we must face. According to Dr. Abdullah, in the city of Riyadh there were 18,000 cases of divorce in one year.
These were the officially registered figures compared to 61,000 registered marriages in the same year. Every day two children were born whose fathers were unknown.
Despite these frightening figures, we continue to talk with obsessive narcissism of our society’s unique morality and values. We talk about family support and togetherness at a time when one third of our women find themselves unmarried and the victim of divorce.
Notwithstanding other social evils, this percentage is more than enough to shake us out of the state of illusion we live in. It is this illusion we keep chanting to others, using honey-coated words to hide the simmering crisis that has brought us to a state where the very future of our children is threatened.
The figures cited by Dr. Abdullah match those found in Western countries which we are keen to criticize in the harshest terms. Not only that, our figures may one day exceed those of the West.
One woman out of three in our country has been involved in a divorce in a year. This is the same figure as in the United States; it is close to that in Britain and is higher than in France where the ratio is one in four.
Divorce is a social evil that calls for combined efforts from every member of society.
We have been too busy looking for the mistakes of others while not paying attention to our own homes which are threatened from within. Our religious, cultural and social emphasis has been mainly on outside conflicts.
It is time now for us to pay serious attention to our domestic problems before they sweep us away.
