Al Batha appears to be one of the few places in Riyadh where the chaos of throbbing city life is free to spill out into the streets unmolested and untainted by any attempt to make things appealing. Maybe this is a kind of capitalism where the main impetus is just to get the thing for sale in front of the person who might buy it and to hell with making anything look nice. Consumer goods (Watches, shoes, cell phones, blankets, dates, pants, luggage, toys, tobacco, snacks, camping equipment, candy, coffee, jackets, t-shirts, etc., etc.) are all piled up in little shops, in large indoor malls and along mazes of alleys.
The crowds filling Al Batha are mostly South East Asian Muslim men from Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan and there’s also a large Filipino contingent. They all come here to socialize, buy cheap goods, get outside and shop in an environment that is accepting of everyone. The few Saudis you see are mostly around Al Batha taxi stand offering people rides to Makkah . The few women you see are beggars from poor Muslim countries and Filipino women out shopping with friends.
John Philby, the British Arabist and diplomatic aid to King Saud during the early formation of the Saudi State, wrote of Al Batha in 1959, “while, on the east bank of the Batha channel, a large suburb had grown up to meet the needs of a new element of the population, the chauffeurs and mechanics from many Muslim lands, attracted to Arabia by the high wages obtainable for their services, to say nothing of the unlimited opportunities of increasing their earnings by theft and peculation. To say the least, it was an unpleasant community, a running sore on the flank of a society which, at that time and at every level, was a model of good manners and moral rectitude. But facilis descensus averno! The Saudi Government has never been able to impose upon it that respect for law and order which is the hallmark of a civilized state.” I’d guess that many westerners still have the same attitude about Al Batha in 2019.
Today I found a Hindi cassette and DVD shop on the second floor of what I believe is called Al Batha Commercial Center Building. The shop is a cube with its walls covered in Tamali and Bollywood DVD covers. What drew my attention were the cassettes under the DVD covers. It seems that the shop had made a transition at some point, to DVD sales and rentals, but that someone had decided that this transition would best be served by simply stapling the DVD covers over the shelves that were already lined with cassettes.
The cassette selection covered the 1970s-early 1990s: Hemanta Mukherjee, Balamuralikrishna, Kader Khan comedy, compilations of 80s western love songs, old Bollywood sound tracks and an assortment of other tapes that looked as though they’d been moved from one geographical location to another for decades. I looked through most of them before I stumbled across The Gheto Boy’s Resurrection album, released in 1996 and considered to be one of their best. I felt a wonderful surprise at how things must circumnavigate the globe: Here in Riyadh, the home of fundamental Islam and the mutawa (The religious police), was a cassette of American hip hop, clearly marked with a parental advisory, on a shelf, for sale, in the heart of the city. For a moment I thought that I could probably be a better mutawa than most mutawa because of my knowledge of what might be seen as decadent from the west.
Lyrics from Still, the second song on the album:
I seen the same nigga with the 9 die with his eyes open
And simply what this means is
He didn’t know that every dog had his day
Until he seen his
I bet you muthafuckas will too
Because its “Die muthafucka, die muthafucka!” still, fool
I guess you can listen to Still as you’re crossing the pedestrian bridge in Al Batha. I think I could probably help the thought police.
Riyadh: Ancient and Modern Author(s): H. St. J. B. Philby
Source: Middle East Journal, Vol. 13, №2 (Spring, 1959), pp. 129–141
Published by: Middle East Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4323104
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