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CLANILISM & CO. Many people like to write about controversial subjects. Some do it just for the sake of controversy. So with the risk of appearing to be one of those people, I decided to sit and write about a subject that has occupied my thinking for many years and has mostly been a taboo-to-talk-about in our culture; I shall call the subject clanilism (clan-ilism). The subject is very sensitive and it touches our lives in many ways. While in many cases it has become a background issue with minimal presence in our daily lives, it still is prominent when marriage is at stake, much more than I thought it was. Many people still consider one’s clan (or even family origin) a very important factor when making their marriage decisions. In Saudi Arabia, many marriages are still arranged or, at the very least, the male’s female family members (mother and sisters usually) play a crucial role in building the “list” of suitable potential “candidates” that the guy can choose from before approaching the female’s family to “ask for her hand.” I could write more on the disadvantages of such an “information system” and contrast it with its advantages (if any), but I will save this idea to another day. I use the word clanilism to indicate the family’s place of origin (town or city) and family genealogy. It is very sad to find that until today, many educated people still discriminate against others (who might be their neighbors) based on where their parents came from or who was their great-great-great-…-grandfather. Some people take this to an absurd level. You might hear someone saying that a person is trustworthy because he’s from a particular town, or you might hear that another person will most likely be a liar and a thief because he’s from some other town. In Saudi Arabia, some people discriminate between regions while others go so far as discriminating between towns within a certain region. Let me illustrate the typical pre-marriage searching process. First, female relatives of the groom-to-be start to “build” a “potentials list”. During the process, of course, they immediately filter out any “candidates” with genealogies they don’t like or that are from areas of the country other than their own (and by their “own” I mean the area of their ancestral origin, not where they currently reside). Of course, they make sure that the filtering happens long before the groom-to-be gets to hear about these candidates--imagine the “tragedy” if he ended up liking one of these outsiders! Only after those rigorous filters are applied does the groom-to-be get to have a say. Needless to say, he does not have much information to rely on, not in a culture with social barriers and erected walls. So the groom-to-be gets to rely on his female relatives for advice. Of course, sometime during the search process the groom-to-be’s female relatives have grown fond of a certain “potential candidate”, and surprise-surprise, that is the one they end up recommending from the list which they themselves compiled! The process would be much more transparent if the list looked something like this: (1) Candidate 1 – we really love this candidate because her mother is really nice and her sister makes good chocolate brownies. And if you try to pick someone else from the list, we’ll give you a really hard time. (2) Candidate 2 to 10 – just in case you fail to notice our brilliant choice of Candidate 1, and giving you a hard time doesn’t work, we’ve compiled this list of “safe bets”; nice girls but not too controversial, their sisters also make good brownies and/or have given us a great carrot-cake recipe. (These qualities are also known as sana’a in Saudi dialect). So the groom-to-be ends up making “his” mind by picking one of “their” choices. Sometime you have to wonder who’s the one getting married here! In most cases, the groom’s father plays a minimal role in this process, and merely gives his approval of the groom’s final choice—something the groom would need to proceed. In a sense, the father has veto power; he can veto out any selection, but is rarely involved in the search process. In the end, the groom-to-be has based his marriage (and thus a big part of his life) on stupid measures of compatibility. Notice that intellectual compatibility was never mentioned, and if it were, it comes only after all other “requirements” were satisfied (which says a lot about their importance to the groom-to-be’s female relatives). What matters is who the girl’s mother is, whether her sisters have good desserts recipes, and all that of course is looked at after we make sure the girl has an attractive genealogy and that her great grandfather lived in a certain town one hundred years ago. Just imagine applying this process to any important (or not-so-important) decision in our lives, how absurd would that be! But why put too much effort into marriage, it is after all, completely up to fate (gismah o’ naseeb). B4
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