JEDDAH, 12 July 2003 — It’s Wednesday night, and the sliding door of the glass lift in the Al-Mahmal shopping center in downtown Jeddah slices off a representative sample of humanity. Indonesians in their colorful pilgrimage best rub shoulders with be-gowned and be-turbaned Africans, and a family of Syrians clusters around an Egyptian with a pencil moustache. My own shambling progress through the mall raises no eyebrows and turns no heads.
Next door, at the Corniche Commercial Center, Filipinos share benches with Turks, and Jordanians gesticulate at Indians. The Saudi at the Internet shop gives me a discount for no reason I can discover. There is a brief hiatus as a pair of tall Europeans in cut-off thobes and sparse but straggly beards make their stately way up the stairs, but soon everything returns to its normal buzz. Outside, the four wooden posts surrounding a table and benches are deemed a sufficient visual barrier to segregate the sexes, or families from singles, for the purposes of an open-air meal.
Up the hill in the Souk Al-Alawi, Saudis, Yemenis and Punjabis dominate, and then you slowly move into African territory. But the clusters of men and boys gathered in the little squares and alleyways always seem to admit a few off-color members among them, a man in a wheelchair here, a couple of Arab boys there. The narrow streets and uneven surfaces make for a lively and intimate atmosphere, though admittedly on hot evenings Balad stinks of the raw sewage that can bubble up over the manhole covers and run down the streets.
Meanwhile in North Jeddah, dust swirls along the eight-lane highways that pass for streets there, and the wind whistles around the coffee shops on either side that are decorated in soulless ersatz modernism and peopled by Saudis only. The young wear Western clothes, but they snip their fingers and bark at the waiters like potentates from an earlier century. Here, heads swivel as I pass. Interaction between nationalities and races here is defined by the simple divide between those who serve and those who bark orders.
North Jeddah may look like the future of Saudi Arabia, at least where it doesn’t look like the past of communist Romania. But it is not. The only way for cities to be viable is for them to be multi-cultural and multi-ethnic. And the only way for the races and cultures to get along is for them to interact. The only place where people can be homogeneous, pure and shut off from the rest of the world is in very small, very isolated, self-sufficient communities.
It is perfectly understandable that people should feel nostalgic for such communities, in the few places where they existed, such as the Amazon rainforest or the Empty Quarter. But they do not exist any more, and cities are not the place to try and recreate them. The reason North Jeddah looks and feels arid is that it is, in every way: spiritually as well as aesthetically and culturally.
As Saudi Arabia’s population continues to mushroom and foreigners show no signs of leaving, its cities will, simply by growing, become home to ever more diverse interests, desires and ways of life. And the cities will have to accommodate that diversity in a way that does not pit these interests against each other in a desperate struggle for dominance but allows them to coexist.
Small places are easy to regulate. But there will come a time when no amount of roadblocks and no commissions for the prevention of this and the promotion of that, however omnipresent, will be able to contain that diversity. Paradoxically, that is when Jeddah’s new parts will be desperate to learn from the old. In Balad, the diversity already exists, and coexistence is practiced. Its inhabitants are prepared for the future. Elsewhere, the walls continue to rise.
