There is only one fact in life and that is: Change. And if there is any fact about us in the Kingdom, it is “the fear of change.” We burst with anger, doubt and question, immerse ourselves in the past once change knocks on our doors.
Most of the recent incidents that took place in the last couple of weeks were about change, while most of our reactions to those events demonstrated our fear of change.
One of those “earth-shattering” events took place when a young Saudi woman decided to cross the border coming from the UAE driving her car, bringing to the surface the issue of Saudi women and driving; the issue that actually has become part of the public conscience during the last few years. The girl was stopped on the Saudi side of the border for hours before she was taken into custody. The officials did not let her pass — although there is no written law banning women from driving, the unwritten understanding prohibits it — and they did not send her back as she was a citizen of this country. They had no option but to let her in. The fear of change was not in the official reaction though — given that I believe it was too extreme — the public reaction to the story is where the fear can be seen and felt.
Similar to many earlier cases of women driving in the Kingdom, the discussions usually turn into controversy and finally into a religious debate. Apparently, at any glimpse of change in the Kingdom, a fallback to religious debates is inevitable. The fear of change materializes when this fallback bounces back with indefinite answers, with many interpretations and many schools of thought. At that moment, the struggle becomes personal, leaving all logic behind and emphasizing the fear of change in every possible way; dark, ill based and gloomy look at the future becomes synonyms to any mention of change.
Roger S. Gil, a family and relationship therapist defines change in the social context as “a modification to a person’s environment, situation, or physical/mental condition that results in circumstances that challenge their existing paradigms. What our definition implies is that humans have a tendency to define how their world is supposed to work. Whenever something happens in our personal world or to our own being that is inconsistent with the way we feel the world should be; we encounter change.”
Because of this fear of inconsistency in the world we live in and presume that it is optimum or even ideal, we miss many opportunities, and we pay socially and economically high prices for nothing but fear, we simply decide to lean on our own beliefs about life and how it should be and continue, trying to enforce this narrow view on the whole society.
The same kind of reactions took place in the second incident in the country; the scholar and his unveiled wife appearance on TV; shock, controversy, religious debates and personal opinions erupted on one of the new/old stories about change in the Saudi society; is it allowed to women uncover their faces in public?
Again, and similar to the case of allowing women to drive, when the religious references became debatable, we choose to fight change through planting fear; the whole society will crumble once women choose to uncover their faces in public.
Our paradigm of countering social change, in any subject, is always the same; deny, ridicule, fight it when it starts, then accept it with so many reservations and finally it becomes part of life; remember the satellite dishes, the Internet, phones with cameras, and in the next generations, women driving, and covering their faces. Our tendency to mix what is personal with the well-being of the whole society is just another mechanism we have chosen to fight change.
The nations that are alive and moving, interact with change, evaluate it, reshape it to comply with their own customs and values, they do not automatically choose to fight it and ridicule it. Change is like time, either to catch up with it, or choose to live in the past instead of the future.
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@smaldosari
