So now what?

Just a note to let you know that I have not ceased being the Roving Royal Researcher I said was going to be, there has just been some bureaucratic delays. I am essentially waiting for the paper work and the contracts to be processed and as any one who has worked in the Middle East can testify, this may take some time. The difficulty, I believe, lies in different attitudes towards time. Westerners like to think of time as a commodity that can be purchased, saved, spent, wasted, squandered, and compensated. In Arab culture, time is something outside of us that flows like a river around us sweeping us along. In English, we say we will meet at 3:00 o'clock. In Arabic, one says, we will meet in 3:00 o'clock. Time is often viewed less precisely. I recently ran across a list of "You Might Be Arab If ..." statements. One read: "You might be an Arab if you show up two hours late and still think its early." I shared that with a few Arab friends, both of whom confirmed the truth of this.

So, now what. I continue working for the Mosaic Foundation until my contract comes through and then its off to the wide world of researching archives throughout the wide, wide world. I will keep you posted.

In the Year 20878 AD/AH

I can still do basic Algebra! Hurray!

I discovered this recently as I attempted to solve a problem that had plagued me for literally minutes. That was this: The Islamic Calendar and the Gregorian (i.e. Christian Calendar) have different lengths. The Islamic Calendar is Lunar and has twelve months. It begins in what is 622 AD in the Western Calendar (on Thursday July 15, to be precise, according to some calculations). In 622, the nascent Muslim community in Mecca fled persecutions and took refuge in the city of Yathrib, thereafter renamed Medina. This flight is known in Arabic as the Hijra, an Arabic word meaning migration or flight.

Ten Lunar years later, in 10 AH (Anno Hegirae, Latin for In the Year of the Hijra), the Prophet Muhammad revealed that God told him that each year should have twelve months and that they should stop adding extra days every year (know as intercalation). The intercalation had been done to keep the months in the same seasons; however, Muhammad stopped this and Muslims today view this as a great blessing since Muslim feast days, such as the fasting of Ramadan and the Pilgrimage to Mecca, are calculated according to the Hijri calendar, the seasons of the festivals change over time.

Since that time, the Islamic world has followed this Hijri calendar. Days, as in the Jewish tradition, begin at sunset, and new months begin with the first viewing of the crescent moon. Today, rather than rely on plain eyesight, mathematical algorithms are done to determine the phases of the moon. This concern for the phases of the moon and the necessity to determine the direction to Mecca for prayer drove Islamic scholars to become masters at astronomy and it was through their work that the world got the astrolabe and the compass; those inestimable tools of navigation.

The problem becomes, however, in this global world, that going between these two systems can be difficult and complex. The following formulas help one convert dates:

AH = 1.030684(CE-621.5643)

CE = 0.970229AH + 621.5643

Where CE equals the Common Era (or the Christian Calendar) date and AH equals the Hijri or Islamic date.

There are difficulties in this calculation though and dates are frequently disputed. An Islamic date recorded in a manuscript in the middle ages, for example, can be extremely tricky to determine precisely in the Western calendar for a variety of reasons. Firstly, in those times, determinations of new months required visually seeing the new crescent moon; though mathematical formulae existed even then. Furthermore, there have been, over the centuries, different Islamic calendars in use in different parts of the Islamic world. This, of course, is not surprising. Europe has only had a unified calendar for a few centuries. In the middle ages, some regions had their own calculations and there were constant debates about which one was best even though there was general agreement on the months (holdovers from Roman times). I can also through another wrench in the gears: namely, that the moon recedes from the earth every year by a couple of centimeters and hence the length of its rotations subtly change. Of course, this has virtually no impact in the short run even including centuries, but over millenia this might affect things. And let's not even discuss the horrors of leap years which exist in both systems!

So, the other day, my coworker and I were discussing these facts. He asked me what year it was in the Islamic system and I replied: 1429 AH. That means that 1429 lunar years have passed since the Hijra; however 1386 solar years have passed (2008-622=1386). Furthermore, in the first year of the Islamic Calendar, the difference between the two systems was 621 (a thoroughly meaningless number by itself since it is a combinations of two systems). Today, the difference is 579. The Islamic calendar is catching up to the Christian calender at a very slow rate. Indeed, it has gained by only 42 in 1386 solar years. Eventually, the years would be the same, I realized. But when? So, I did the following math:

Let x=CE
Let y=AH
x=0.970229y=621.5643
y=1.030684(x-621.5643)

Since I wanted to find the point at which x=y I substituted x for y and set the two equations as equal, hence:

0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.030684(x - 621.5643)

I proceeded to calculated as follows:

0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.030684(x - 621.5643)
0.970229x + 621.5643 = 1.038684x - 640.6363789812
0.970229x + 1262.2006789812 = 1.038684x
1262.2006789812 = .060455x
0.060455x = 1262.2006789812
x= 20878.350492

That means that in the year 20,878 AD it will also be the year 20,878 AH. Christianity and Islam will finally come together and peace will reign upon the earth. Now we need only wait 18,870 years (19,449 lunar!) for peace. At the current rate of the peace process in the Middle East, this might be early.

Stranger things...

Just a short entry today. I have been trying to find some traditional Saudi children's clothes for my sister's kids, but to no avail. I have asked several people and I always end up being directed to stores that sell blue jeans and "the Gap" t-shirts. This leads to the inevitable conclusion that the tradition clothing of Saudi Arabia consists of blue jeans and baby Gap. That, however, is only the frame of the story. During my meanderings in the market I saw a store that sold movies and music and decided to check it out. I really have only two interests when shopping: books, the older the better; and music. Everything else, like food, clothing, and deodorant, are optional and waste money that could more profitably be spent on books. As I wondered the much editted selection of the store, which consisted mostly of Bollywood movies and American pop albums with black marker covering up the women (Shakira's album was, in fact, completely blacked out), I saw the recently released movies. There was "Enchanted" in Arabic, lots of Hollywood and Bollywood fare and, most surprising of all -- so surprising, in fact, that I am tempted to return to the store, camera in hand, just to take a picture if I thought they would not chase me out for doing so -- was the complete "Work and the Glory" series. Who marketed that here?! The box did not say whether the movie was translated or even subtitled in Arabic, but there it was right on the "Hot New Releases" shelf. Weird. It is a small world afterall.

A Night Out on the Town

One of my new bosses, and there appear to be several, all of whom are princesses -- a sign, perhaps, of future problems, assigned her assistant, Ra'id to show me around a little. The national pasttime of Saudi Arabia appears to be shopping. I visited both the old Thumairy Market by Al-Masmak fortress, which I keep mistakenly referring to as a palace, and some modern malls and shopping districts. There are no clubs and restaurants are often segregated into single (i.e. men), and family sections -- even the McDonalds I passed had two seperated sides separated by a wall. The malls have levels with signs reading: "Entry forbidden to single men, families only." It was interesting to see that many people shop as families, though this may also have something to do with the fact that women cannot go out without an adult male relative accompanying them. Indeed, in most of its outward appearences, Riyadh scarcely differs from many American cities with strip malls, freeways, ubiquitious cars, fast food chains, and so on save in one aspect: the lack of women out and about.

The picture above is, I should mention, my hotel by night. This picture is the Faisaliyah tower all aglow. Returning to women. It is interesting to me to see men doing most of the errands. One of my bosses, a princess, has a male assistant who does all her errands. We visited a modern mall, which, minus the Arabic signs, looked as though it had been transported from suburban Washington, D.C. (the rich part, of course). The women in their long black abayas, not all of whom wore hijabs and veils by the way, suddenly brought to my mind the Harry Potter films with everyone swishing around in long black cloaks.

The other difficulty is that during every prayer time, every shop must close. The locals are accustomed to it and plan accordingly, the few foreigners like myself, and there were very few especially in the Thumairy Market where I saw none whatsoever, do find it somewhat difficult to interrupt one's shopping and site seeing continuiously throughout the day. I don't complain of course; it would be beyond rude to do so. The best time to go shopping is after the evening prayer around 8:00 pm because there are no more prayers until morning and the stores stay open until 1 or 2 in the morning. I past a KFC that was open until 3:00 am.

Here is Kingdom Tower by night from Olaya street where we visited Jarir bookstore, the Barnes and Noble of Saudi Arabia. It really is. You can buy everything from the complete sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (which I did for an unbelievably low price by American standards), to the latest Stephen King novel both in English and Arabic. It also had a Starbucks cafe in the corner. It was a good place to visit. I was able to purchase some novels to help improve my Arabic. Again, I was the only non-Arab I saw and was a source of curiousity to many children.

Photography is discouraged in many parts of Saudi Arabia and I have been warned not to take pictures of women nor of anybody without their permission. This made it all but impossible for me to photograph the old market or the mall. I even did a google search to see if any braver souls had done it and found none at all. My verbal pictures will have to suffice, I suppose.

My favorite place in the old market was an antique store that puts any antique store in America to shame. When I visited with Princess Maha, she lamented to me that too few of the Saudis appreciate the remants of their heritage and so books, documents, artefacts, buildings, and so forther, unless they are Qurans, (her words) are razed or tossed. In this store I saw cardboard boxes full of hand illuminated manuscripts some of them dating back to the sixteenth and seventeenth century. There were rust canckered swords and daggers. I bought the dagger at the left, a book (see my previous entry), and some jewellry. There were lots of ivory and coral items for sale. Can't buy any of them, of course. It's illegal to bring them back into the States. There were old globes, a rusted astrolabe, hundreds of daggers just sitting in a box, old shields, jewellry, and so on. Some were no doubt fakes or reproductions and I am not expert enough to tell the genuine antiques from the real things (except, of course, for the books). Since, however, this was no tourist trap dump like those that surround the Pyramids of Giza (no offense, but it's true), I was less suspicious than I would normally be.

So, basically a night on the town in Riyadh is shopping and eating. Not really all that different than back home the social dynamics are a little different. I quickly learned, however, that creative locals find ways around it mostly involving cell phones. Tomorrow I meet once more with the princesses and the gentlemen they are hiring to organize the materials already here in

Riyadh. I will also finally visit the exhibit on King Faisal which was part of the main reason for my trip. However, we delayed visiting at first because Princess Haifa wanted to meet me at the exhibit and then the exhibit was close for much of the weekend open only for a few hours at night for families only. We unattached men can only visit in the early morning. Until then.