The Bro Code of Saudi Culture: Describing the Saudi from Head to Toe

ISBN-13: 9781532830136 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 318 str.

Abdul Al Lily

Opis

Every culture is governed by an internal code of conduct, and this publication offers the first written code of Saudi culture. The Saudi way of being has long been an oral tradition passed merely verbally from one generation to the next, despite its power to regulate every aspect of public and private lives. Most Saudi norms and values have long been unwritten and only orally communicated among Saudis. As a result, visitors to Saudi Arabia have been unable to read about Saudi norms and values. For this reason, this book spells out Saudi norms and values in bold print, recording the Saudi code of conduct and displaying it in a published format. It displays 2222 tweet-sized (often previously unrecorded) explanations of how the human body acts inside Saudi Arabia. It covers everything from top to bottom; the face, eyes, ears, mouth, waist, genitals and extremities. It is the product of close observations of everyday activities and around 2,000 interviews with nationals and residents, over the past five years. This book is the first to talk about Saudi culture in a purely descriptive (and thus non-judgemental and unbiased) manner. It is the first to present Saudi values and norms in the form of a bullet-pointed list and in tweet-sized explanations. It is the first to be written by a male Saudi who was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, who is still based in this country, who is a former officially-recognised imam and who comes from a working-class family-yet he is a backpacker, is married to a non-Saudi, non-Arab and non-Muslim European, studied in Oxford, published with the largest international academic publishers and hence has the ability to communicate with foreign mentalities. Books about Saudi culture tend to be too serious; however, this book is not meant to be taken too seriously. The book is intended to be entertaining and humorous (and surely informative). It avoids the use of the words 'religion' and 'politics' because of two main reasons. First, these two words are sensitive (and serious). Second, the book is purely cultural and written entirely for the sake of cultural exchange (not for religious or political matters). This book is unbiased, exposing both negative and positive practices in Saudi society. Many Saudi readers of the book have criticised the author for not trying to invite (through and in the book) non-Muslim readers to Islam. Yet, this book is written purely for the sake of cultural exchange (not for religious reasons), with no religious or political agendas.