ALL STREETS ARE JOYRIDING STREETS
THAMIR WAS RUNNING HIS WELL-ATTENDED ISLAMIC AWARENESS group in the Tumiya neighborhood, on the outskirts of Riyadh. He commuted by car every day from an upper-middle-class suburb, where he lived in his parents’ home. Tumiya had the reputation of being difficult. Recently settled by rural migrants—it was “95% Bedouin,” Thamir told me—the neighborhood was seen by members of the sedentary middle class as a “drug den” and a “dangerous suburb.” Not all suburbs were middle class.
Over the years I often roamed Tumiya onboard more or less decrepit U.S. gas guzzlers, drinking soda and chatting with a few friends I had met there. In Tumiya, “all the streets are joyriding streets,” ʿAli, a small-time joyrider and drug addict told me. If most streetlamps seemed dead at night, it was because “too many cars hit them” while drifting, he added. The neighborhood was a shantytown until the 1980s. In some areas, wooden shacks and dismantled trucks were still used as makeshift stores. Elsewhere, small villas and low apartment buildings were set along a grid of perpendicular streets and avenues. Puddles of raw sewage rotted in the streets, garbage was strewn along the avenues, many houses were in disrepair, and screeching tires could be heard at all hours of the night.
Employed residents of Tumiya tended to work for the National Guard, the police, or private security companies, earning salaries ranging from the equivalent of around US$500 (in the private sector) to US$1,500 (in the public sector). Many youths embraced a military or police career right after high school, with the National Guard and the police being the most desirable choices. After four months of training, my joyrider friend told me, recruits were admitted, without an entry exam, into an easy job with a fixed income and a civil servant status. They could buy a car on credit and get married; they would often continue living in a room of the family home and only buy an apartment much later. Young women got married earlier; they lived secluded lives, first in their parents’ home and then with their in-laws.
Unemployment and marriage kept Tumiya youth close to home. Marriage cost less than elsewhere in Riyadh: a typical dowry in the late 2000s was around the equivalent of ten thousand dollars, with the celebration costing half that sum. The groom would receive five thousand dollars from the state to cover marriage expenses and his extended family and friends would lend him the rest. Guests would bring somewhere between fifty and a hundred and fifty dollars each on the wedding day; the sums would be carefully registered in a notebook and the groom would have to reimburse his guests, either on their own wedding day or at the wedding of one of their close relatives. Not doing so would mean exposing oneself to a slow but certain social death.
Regular wages had allowed Saudi residents of Tumiya to build cement-and-concrete villas, buy apartments, and invest in small businesses. Yet many of Tumiya’s residents, including Talal’s family, were stateless persons, or bidun, an Arabic word meaning “deprived of” and used as shorthand for the expression “deprived of nationality.” Even though the bidun were often Bedouin, the two terms are distinct: the word for Bedouin in Arabic is badu, meaning “nomads” (and the origin of the English word “Bedouin”). The stateless spoke Arabic with a Saudi accent and dressed like Saudis. They were given a specific “Arab migrant” ID that placed them slightly above the rest of the country’s labor migrants. They could not buy property or invest in businesses, but they did not need a visa or a sponsor to work. These stateless persons had been overlooked by the state when it started granting Saudi citizenship, often because they lived far from administrative centers or were not aware of the citizenship-granting process. Although acquiring Saudi citizenship was theoretically possible, it proved more and more difficult.1
To obtain a Saudi passport, stateless people often claimed to be the son or daughter of a citizen. Until recently, they had needed only two witnesses to establish filiation; now the state required an official birth certificate. In addition, the applicant had to obtain a “declaration of recognition” from their muʿarrif, a civil servant on the state payroll who represented the tribe at the central administration. Corruption was endemic in these processes. The muʿarrif could be bought off, as could civil servants. People I spoke to in Tumiya estimated that it cost the equivalent of around ten thousand dollars for a bidun to acquire Saudi citizenship, bribes included.
Statelessness forced many Tumiya residents into precarious existences. The stateless often worked menial, ill-paid jobs and had to seek aid from their extended families. Citizens were significantly better off, but the lack of economic opportunities outside of the security forces was an issue. The cultural gap separating Tumiya from middle-class neighborhoods showed the structural violence its residents faced. One day, I introduced ʿAli the joyrider to a friend who was also Bedouin but who belonged to the middle class and went to college. ʿAli exhibited distinctly effeminate behavior while casually talking about his amorous prowess, including conquests of other young men. ʿAli was attractive, but the blackened stumps in his mouth shouted his lack of access to healthcare and his inadequate diet. After we left Tumiya, my middle-class friend turned to me in anger.
“I have rarely met anybody that gross in my whole life,” he said. “Be really careful: he can be dangerous. If he carries drugs and if the police stop you . . . this guy is finished.”
The youth of Tumiya responded to structural oppression in various ways. Even though the area was inhabited by cops and National Guards, it was known among middle-class residents for its unruliness.
“Look there,” ʿAli said one day as we drove by, “that is the police station. By God, after they installed it, the day before the inauguration by the governor of Riyadh, kids broke in to steal A/C units and computers. Can you imagine? The governor comes, the station is empty.”
Local youth also wrote graffiti on the walls of the police station, proclaiming in large letters: “We are the sons of Tumiya, nobody governs us.”2 Thamir’s students told me how police patrols driving through the neighborhood were often pelted with stones or eggs.
When local youths were arrested, their mates would try all possible tricks to free them from the back of the police cruiser. When the police knocked on a door looking for a youth, the elder of the household would often come out and talk down to the police, sometimes hurling insults at them. Bedouin etiquette demanded that elders be respected, especially when they had a big mouth and were defending the honor of their house. Sometimes the police had to require tribal authorities to convince an elder to let them search a house.
A bank shut down after joyriders crashed into it; cafés were often invaded by droves of kids who would watch TV there without buying anything and break tables and chairs; many businesses went bankrupt. On the nearby freeway, water trucks often zoomed by at breakneck speed, bringing water to the neighborhood (there was no running water) or taking sewage away (there was no sewer system). Five of Salman’s friends had died in car accidents on this stretch of highway. Truckers driving too fast were sometimes chased by local youths who would force them to stop and, sometimes, beat them up.
The walls of schools and public buildings were covered in graffiti spelling out lust, local pride, and a passion for joyriding. “I love you, Stinky”; “Falluja hood”; “I fuck Abu Muhammad”; “You crazy, throw this iron, your love will grow.”3 (Iron was a metonym for a car, and “throwing the iron,” in joyriding lingo, meant joyriding or drifting.) “Bidun” was written on many walls. School walls became a site of competition among various graffiti artists as well as between them and the state. After one of the schools had had all the graffiti washed off and had been repainted, somebody wrote “Congratulations on the new paint” in large, colorful letters.4
Young Islamic activists also added their voice to the chorus, writing graffiti that said, for instance, “Pray before they pray at your funerals” or “Say good things and persevere.”5 Some graffiti showed elaborate designs and an attention to classical Arabic calligraphy. Salman told me that reform-school inmates had to learn a craft during detention and often chose calligraphy. To him there was a direct link between youth incarceration and street art: the more former inmates there were in a given area, the more graffiti one found on its walls.
Tumiya residents described their neighborhood as a microcosm of Riyadh, with a commercial street; primary, middle, and high schools; and even a small compound nearby that was inhabited by U.S. employees and defense contractors.
“But these are good Americans,” ʿAli said. “When we joyride, they crowd up on the sidewalk, here, to cheer us on, and nobody ever says anything against them. It is probably the only compound in Riyadh that has not been bombed.”
“Because you guys scare the shit out of al-Qaʿeda,” said one of his friends.
Further away, between villas and apartment blocks, there were rest houses. Some were said to be owned by princes; one of them was rented by the fire brigade.
“You see these two lights outside?” ʿAli said, pointing to a rest house. “If they are on, it means the firemen are there, no joyriding tonight. If they are off, you can go.”
Tumiya was a village. Like many of Riyadh’s neighborhoods, it had a distinct identity, and its residents divided the world into two spheres: inside of Tumiya, and outside of Tumiya.
“I am outside of Tumiya,” ʿAli would say on the phone to escape family duties, even when he was still roaming its streets. Being “outside of Tumiya” meant being untouchable, having set off for the wider world, away from the neighborhood’s issues.
Many interlocutors told me how, in this deteriorated environment, their fathers had either abdicated their authority or become domestic tyrants who tried to keep their children away from the streets.
“My dad was a controller,” Talal said. “He wanted us to walk straight. . . . One day, I started showing that I had had enough; I started getting angry. . . . Because the one who gets angry, they see him as a pain in the ass, and they start negotiating with him. . . . I was a real pain in the ass.”
Everybody laughed.
“I started a crisis at home. I started to whack everybody, even the young ones.”
Talal’s predicament was light compared to that of children who were slapped, bitten, pinched, beaten, and kicked, terrorized by fathers or brothers armed with sticks, metal bars, knives, and guns.6 “Kids need to be tamed” and “women deserve the red eye,” the eye of anger: these were some fathers’ mottos, and neither of those boded well for either children or wives.7 No wonder boys wanted to flee into the street to escape domestic violence. (Girls did not have this option.)
“Your life is compartmentalized,” Salman said. “There are very few outings. In most houses—I mean, I speak about our house here, really—your elder brother has full authority over you and controls you; you cannot do anything. That is, if the father is not there. . . . Before I turned six, I was home most of the time. We would never go out, except to visit relatives.”
“Wait,” Thamir said. “But there are always kids in the streets around here.”
“Not in our family. . . . I told you, I am just talking about our family. We never go out. And even if the youngest one gets out and stays by the door, just like that, he gets slapped and yelled at. And he gets back inside. . . . They do not want to mingle with people from outside. Because in our neighborhood, there are . . .”
He hesitated to finish his sentence.
“. . . Bad things . . . ,” Thamir whispered.
“Because in our neighborhood,” Salman said, “there are people who smoke and I do not know what else.”
When “people from outside” the house dealt alcohol and drugs or became embroiled in street fights and joyriding, no wonder fathers locked up their kids at home. Salman’s siblings were expected to remain home and quietly work toward their social advancement.
“They encourage us to study,” Salman said. “For instance, my dad comes with three books in hand and gives money to whoever will read them.”
Keeping kids at home could be a sign of social prestige, or morality, or a simple precaution; it could also be undergirded by patriarchal violence. But other families in Tumiya were less strict when it came to the mobility of their (male) children, whether because the father was absent or because he did not see the street as a problem.
“In my family,” Saʿud said, “it is considered normal: kids can go outside, it is not a problem. My elder brother knows the neighborhood, the streets, the stores. And the little ones could come and go; it was normal. . . . But I was not with them. I would stay home. I did not like the streets, honestly. . . . My parents allowed me to go out, but I did not like it. . . . Do you see the fights, the scraps that happen outside?”
The other students laughed.
“Me, I loved cats.”
He sniggered.
“Yeah, even that one time, he slaughtered one,” Salman said.
“Its mother, I do not know why, was yelling at me, somehow.”
“She had children. So, one time, when she was away, I grabbed one and I cut it into pieces.”
“That is weird,” Salman said. “Saʿud is not normal.”
Tumiya youth lived in a violent environment. They were the victims of social and symbolic violence and the authors of some forms of violence, too. They suffered and inflicted suffering in turn. This multifaceted violence, toward children and animals, people and things, was precisely one of the issues that Thamir was trying to tackle through his local activism in the high school awareness group.