I am happy to announce that my 4th book, Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions, will be available in June – https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-96-5326-3. 

This book outlines strategies for current or soon-to-be business professionals, government employees, researchers and teachers to communicate, study and work effectively on the Arabian Peninsula. Using first-person accounts, as well as scholarly research from the fields of history, anthropology, political science, travel writing and literature, this book gives clear advice for expats wanting to create successful interactions with people from Arabian Peninsula societies. By discussing how the practicalities of work and research intersect with cultural norms, this book fills the gap between tourist guides aimed at the causal tourists and academic texts on narrowly defined topics.

Navigating Public Spaces – walking

People who come from cultures in which it’s normal and easy to go by foot and/ or public transportation for shopping, work and recreation might have to adjust their expectations. Some mixed-use developments, like the Pearl in Qatar and City Walk in Dubai, are set up for ease of movement, but they are the exception.

Maneval mentions that “streets in contemporary neighbourhoods in Jeddah have been designed for cars and not for pedestrians…Except for a few streets in the old town and its adjacent neighbourhoods, there are no pavements” (2019 180). The same holds true in most towns on the Arabian Peninsula. Home-owners will often pave the section between the house wall and the street to use as a parking space, but there are often no sidewalks. To walk from one house to another, you will constantly move between different types of paving stones, gravel, parked cars, dumpsters and rocky open land.

Sometimes the house takes up all of the land and the house wall is so close to the street that the owner must park in the street. While this isn’t legal, it’s also not complained about and no one would suggest tearing down the house wall to get the cars out of the streets, so although all residential areas are designed with two-way streets, practically-speaking many have only the center of the street open for driving.

The mosque is seen as the center of the neighborhood; men walk to it for the 5 daily prayers if they are in the house at prayer time. This walking is the only time I have seen men walk within neighborhoods. Women do not often go to the mosque, but some will walk around the neighborhood with children as exercise. 

The area around a mosque is usually paved with flag stones where men stand and talk before and after prayers. During Ramadan, this space can be used for iftar, the sunset meal to break the fast, with dates, pastries, fruit with water, juice and/ or butter milk (laban), etc. given free. The space is also used to collect goods during charity drives. 

Many mosques share a side wall with a shop. There might be only one small grocery store or a few shops including a bakery, vegetable store and/ or dry-cleaners. Men can stop and pick up necessities for the house on the way back from prayers and children are sent to get last-minute items for meal preparation or to buy sweets. Many neighborhood mosques have small playgrounds near them.

In commercial areas, there is also usually little walking. While a row of shops with aligned storefronts may have a short, common sidewalk, walking between stores means navigating many different types of paving materials, open spaces and parked cars, with the additional hazard of dripping air conditioners.

Many expats live in high-rise apartment buildings which have small shops on the first floor, e.g. dry clearer, coffee shop, small grocery store, fruit and vegetable store, shoe repair, etc. There is endless duplication so that if your building does not have a shop you need, a nearby building probably will. The clerks in the store can bring whatever is needed up to an apartment and an apartment dweller can pick up whatever is needed on the way to or from work.

Walking for fun is usually done in public spaces set up by municipal governments for recreational purposes, such outdoor shopping malls, walking paths, picnic areas and beaches. As one researcher told me, “You drive to walk.” Meaning, you often need to get into your car to get to a place where it’s fun and comfortable to walk.

Since land is bought and sold in parcels which are developed at different times, you can often find a luxury property next to empty lot which might be used as a garbage tip. There is seldom the cheek and jowl, seamless, block after block of retail stores that you can find in European downtowns. You might park in scrubland then walk in the street to get to your office building or live in an enclave that is surrounded by sandy waste.

No matter what you are wearing, if you are walking in public, you are going to be stared at which can be frightening if you come from a culture in which eye contact from strangers is a sign of danger. Some people love this attention, some hate it – but there is no way to stop it. Dressing immodestly may cause more staring, but dressing conservatively does not prevent it. Wearing sunglasses, walking with someone and not looking at other people can help you minimize the discomfort and there is rarely any overt behavior (such as being followed or called out to), but you are going to be observed and judged at every public appearance. 

Navigating Public Spaces – gender issues

If you come from a culture which does not have a focus on keeping space between men and women in public, there might be some adjustments as you get used to the Arabian Peninsula. There are three basic ways to keep a male/ female separation in public: 1) laws/ government regulations, 2) how the buildings are planned, i.e., built-in elements and 3) people’s individual choices.

For example, some commercial and public spaces have laws such as women-only restaurants or women-only days at a shopping festival or park or women-only wards in a hospital.

Depending on where you are, you might see specific written instructions such as “family area” or “women and families only on Tuesdays.” Some restaurants have the family area upstairs with the entry through a different door. Sometimes the family section is a group of small closed rooms or it is divided from the open section by a low wall.        

Some locations don’t have laws or built-in barriers, but people walk and sit in ways to create gender divisions in places such as the gate area in airports and on beaches. Several years ago my bank started an initiative to have a “women’s only” teller complete with a long, narrow, pink carpet for women to stand on while waiting. Before this, women wearing black abayahs would often cut to the front of the line or stand in line, then men would gesture for them to go to the front. Women who were not conservatively dressed would wait in line but there would be a little extra empty space ahead of and behind them.

The “women’s only line” initiative fizzled out fairly soon (I never saw a woman in the women’s teller space, although there are female tellers) and was eventually replaced with a ticket system in which each person would take a numbered ticket when they arrived and wait for the number to be called. The chairs in the waiting area are not marked in any way, but are always divided by the people waiting with women in one section and men in another.

Similarly, in Oman hospitals and clinics often have ‘women-only’ and ‘men-only’ waiting rooms but you can find people sitting and looking in ways to create privacy for others. For example, a man who is with his mother might sit in the ‘women-only area,’ but stay next to the door. Several times when men in my research group have been sick, I have visited them, sometimes staying for hours in areas marked ‘men-only.’ And I know that sons, brothers, husbands and fathers walk into ‘women-only’ wards to visit female relatives.

In general, both men and women can define their wish to apart by using location and clothing. For example, one woman might choose to sit in the open section of a restaurant, while another pulls the back of the sheila over her face to cover her eyes as she walks to the woman-only section.

And just as there are signals that you want privacy, there are signals that you don’t want privacy, i.e., “look at me” behavior – talking loudly, gesticulating, wearing a lot of perfume and clothes to accentuate shape, this includes men wearing brightly colored and/ or very tight fitting dishdashes.

Sometimes the signal is: “look at me being virtuous,” i.e., preforming conservative beliefs in public in a way that attracts attention so that you know you will to be under observation. For example, in an airplane, some Dhofari women make a very public controversy about refusing to sit next a man; this can be done very loudly with raised voices, blocking the aisle, refusing to sit where asked, arguing with a stewardess, etc.[1]

How privacy works in public areas is not simply the physical set-up, distance or clothing, locals also use deliberate systems of noticing and not noticing to grant a kind of seclusion to others. For example, sometimes Omanis purposefully don’t “see” people who share their space. This can be a way of showing respect; a married man who is walking with his wife in a mall might be ignored by friends who pass him or acknowledge him only with a small gesture such as lifting the eyebrows.

If I am sitting alone in a café, men who know me will often ignore me until either another man from my research groups comes to sit with me or they are leaving the café. What often happens is that they will walk slowly, allowing their friends to go ahead, then come to my table to say hello, while their friends wait outside the door.

A general rule of thumb is that if you are male, learn to make room for conservatively dressed females, even if within your own culture women make way for men. On the walking paths, men need to move to the side to let women pass; on beaches and in picnic areas, if there are women sitting together, it is expected that no man will approach them.

If you are male and accidently bump into a local woman, take up whatever the “I’m sorry” position is in your culture. For many North Americans that means hands up at shoulder-height, slightly away from the body, palms facing the person you touched, while slowly backing up.

If you are female and not dressed like a local, be prepared that some men will refuse to notice your existence, to the point of practically running you over in hallways.

            [1] This can also be done politely and without fanfare. Once, as I stood next to my aisle seat preparing to sit down, the man in the middle seat spoke quietly to his young son at the window, who then switched places with him. The son clearly wanted to be by the window, but the father did not want to sit next to me.