Here’s the ad. A young Saudi boy kicks a soccer ball around in the desert. He has two poles stuck in the ground for the goal posts. He kicks the ball toward the makeshift goal.
The little boy suddenly morphs into a member of the Saudi National Soccer Team kicking a goal with a large crowd cheering in the background. The soccer player quickly retrieves the ball, looks into the camera and says, “Sports, not drugs.” The caption below the player reads, “This ad was brought to you by the People of Saudi Arabia.”
“Produce it and put it on American TV and watch the positive reaction,” said a friend of mine who came up with this idea. It just might work.
Sports is a universal bridge between cultures. Whether you are American or a Saudi, you can get into the excitement of a good soccer game. And you don’t have to be able to speak each other’s language to enjoy the thrill of athletic events. The common language is sports. Sports can bridge cultural, political and generational gaps and simultaneously fill the emotional needs and unlimited energies of today’s youth. This week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled, “In the Middle East, Illegal Street Racing Thrives.”
The article talks about the illegal street-racing or joyriding scene throughout the Middle East and how it is becoming a huge problem in the region. The article states, “In Saudi Arabia, young men pilot their Lamborghinis and Porsches over a bridge that separates Saudi from neighboring Bahrain to stage weekend races there.”
The Wall Street Journal article points out that roughly 60 percent of the Middle East’s population is under the age of 25 and “many of these youths are flush with disposable income as their countries’ economies boom from high oil revenues”. The article also points out that record numbers of Saudi and other Gulf citizens are being killed in automobile accidents.
Many articles have been written in the Arab press about the illegal joyriding and daredevil racing on the roads and streets in the Middle East. An article previously published by Mohannad Sharawi in the Arab News referred to joyriding in Saudi Arabia and quoted many Saudi youthful participants into daredevil racing. The Sharawi article stated that boys between 15 and 20 are the main participants in this dangerous game and points out that these young people not only illegally race cars at haphazardly high speeds but also speed around city traffic on motorbikes.
One 17-year-old Saudi youth was quoted as saying, “We gather on special occasions, such as Eid, to watch drivers take risks on the Corniche (in Jeddah).” The young man also said that young boys have been seduced by this craze because they have nothing else to do. Another young man stated, “Speed is fun. We always race our cars. The warnings from the police make no difference. It’s the most exciting thing to do.”
In his new book, “Culture and Customs of Saudi Arabia,” David Long, an expert on Saudi Arabia, states, “The stresses on the extended family structure of Saudi society have been felt most by young people. It is they for whom the clash of instant gratification associated with modernization and guilt created by abandoning traditional Islamic social values is most acute.” Long goes on to say, “In the cities, for example, young people in their late teens and early twenties, while submitting to formal traditional family norms of behavior, increasingly lead ‘underground lives’.”
He finishes, “Saudi social customs are changing at a dizzying rate, but traditional social norms based on deep-seated traditional cultural values change slowly.” Saudi Arabian youth are experiencing a combination of “culture shock” and “future shock” simultaneously. Culture shock has become a familiar term for marking the unsettling disorientation and bewilderment associated with movement into unfamiliar society contexts particularly from new and different cultures. Future shock is a term coined by author Alvin Toffler some years ago that refers to the disorienting effect of accelerated change comparable to the experience of culture shock.
A New York Times article some time ago focused on “restless and confused” young people living throughout Saudi Arabia. In an article titled, “Bored Saudi Youth Take Wild Side to the Street,” Elaine Sciolino wrote, “...young men are rebelling...luring police officers into 120 mile-an-hour chases on the freeways.”
Any youth has hormones. Too much leisure time and having nothing to do can get them flowing at breakneck speed. That is the problem. What are some possible solutions to this dilemma?
In the Arab News article by Sharawi, one of the students says, “They should set up supervised places for young Saudis to practice and watch professional driving and then joyriding would become a thing of the past. So many young boys — me included — were very keen to watch the professional car racing held in the Ministry of Information stadium during the last Jeddah festival. “In the United Arab Emirates, the Emirates Motorplex in Umm Al Quain, owned by the Sheikh of the Emirate, Rashid Bin Ahmed Al Mualla, has upped its activities partly in an effort to get young men to go there instead. Racing clubs, soccer teams, athletic meets. Sports — not daredevil racing, not speeding on the freeways not accidents on the highways. Go Saudi Arabia. Sports, not drugs.
