I sometimes have to pinch myself to remember that I am in an Islamic country.
I sometimes have to pinch myself to remember that I am in an Islamic country.
Halloween was recently celebrated in Bahrain with all the grisly reality that you would expect in the rural USA.
Ghoulish skeletons adorned every club and bar and people walked around in broad daylight with fake blood oozing from their mouths or wearing scary ‘shout’ masks.
Bahraini youths are so intent on looking different that they all look the same in their grunge American white T-shirts and tattered jeans with back-to-front baseball caps.
Father Christmas has arrived in force and inhabits every major mall and hotel foyer with Rudolph and his caribou friends, and soon ‘Bony M’ will be belting out their Christmas lyrics.
The main exhibition at the Bahrain National Museum is on India, and the most exciting show coming to town is the Birmingham Stage Company’s ‘Barmy Britain’, one of their ‘Horrible History’ series.
Down ‘American Alley’, the main drag in Juffair where I live, every fast food outlet in existence has a presence, including Nando’s from South Africa.
The closest you get to Arabian food is a Turkish restaurant, although Turks are not Arabs, of course, although they are Muslims, and their food is more Mediterranean than Middle East.
The Turks delight in serving sis kebaps, salmon patties, eggplant fries, beet salads, marinated olives and bean and chickpea salads, although there is considerable overlap with the traditional Arabian preference for sumptuous banquets of lamb, chicken, beef, goat and camel meat served over rice with generous helpings of white cheese, yoghurt, courgettes, cucumbers and onions.
The hotel in which I am staying has four restaurants – Italian, Indian, Mexican and Japanese – with no hint of Arab cuisine. But the local customs soon remind you that you are in Bahrain. During my three years here I have not once been invited into the house of a Bahraini, and I never will be as it is not their custom to invite ‘non-believers’ into their homes.
This would, of course, be unthinkable in South Africa where we would welcome them into our homes at the earliest opportunity.
Then again, we can be grateful that Bahrain is a liberal Arab state. Last week we heard news of a woman who was jailed for a year in Iran after being kept in solitary confinement for 41 days prior to her ‘trial’.
Her crime: attending a men’s volleyball match! The court ruled that they were protecting her dignity by punishing her in this way and hoped that her punishment would discourage other women from witnessing the ‘lewd behaviour’ of men.
