A time to pray,a time to play?: Everyday life in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia between the temporalities of religion,tradition and consumerism

Introduction

When as a result of the First World War the last Islamic empire finally disintegrated and the Ottoman caliphate was subsequently abolished by the new Turkish Republic, it was clear that times had changed in the Middle East. In the heartland of the former Ottoman Empire, the Turkish republican revolution had established the beginnings of a secular nation state. Its leader Mustafa Kemal announced that, in order not to be defeated and enslaved by Western civilisation – a civilisation which he described as an ‘ardent coal of fire that burns and destroys all those who don’t agree to recognize it’ (Ünsal, 1979: 35) – the new republic had to become part of it, had to Westernise if it did not want to be dominated by Western powers. Literally doing away with the old hats also the old time, Islamic time, was abandoned. This switch to Western time sealed a deep incision that reached from the surface of public life deep into people’s biographical trajectories, first in the urban areas but increasingly also in the countryside.

At the same time the Saudi revolution which gained momentum in the mid-1920s and would lead, in 1932, to the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) on the southern edge of the demised Empire, took an entirely different course (Edens, 1974). Here breaking with Ottoman rule and fending off Western domination was achieved through a turn towards a programme of purification of Islamic tradition, a return to the first sources. ¹ The KSA is, according to its Basic Law, an Islamic state which regards the Qur’an and the Sunna as its constitution (Al-Fahad, 2005: 385). Any open articulation of an agenda of modernisation in the KSA therefore must accept that the rules of social life are defined by Islamic principles that permeate the texture of everyday life in a way which means that the very fabric of time is structured by them. But it would be simplistic to just accept the assumption that in the KSA, or in any Islamic society for that matter, about everything is defined by religion – an assumption that often renders the complexity of social life invisible (Zubaida, 2011). On the one hand, due to the way that the Kingdom is tied into the global economy and has absorbed technological developments, there have been challenges to the predominance of the religious concept of time in Saudi society. On the other hand, social life in Saudi Arabia long was and still to an extent is structured by tribal allegiances and Arab cultural traditions. These may, over the centuries, have been aligned to Islamic practices but cannot be understood as inherently Islamic in themselves. It was, after all, primarily against cultural traditions and social structures perceived as un-Islamic aberrations that most of the ideological efforts of the Saudi revolution were directed. These traditions were subordinated to a rationalised theological interpretation of the Qur’an and the Sunnah (i.e. the traditions of the Prophet as verified by an unbroken chain of transmission, an isnad). While the time of the tribes still militates against the time of Islam, it is clearly the latter that defines the framework.

Accommodating Western times for the purpose of administrative and economic modernisation within the bounds of Islamic legislation was a less conflict-laden process. This was not only due to the pragmatism that informed Saudi governmental practice in what Edens (1974: 61) called an extended ‘Thermidor’ from the foundation of the Kingdom in 1932 onwards and deepened by the discovery of oil in 1938. Crucially both the Wahhabi (or as it is officially called Unitarian, muwahhid) doctrine and Western modernity are pronouncedly urban doctrines sharing an urge to de-traditionalise and to rationalise; so that the modernism of the Saudi conception of Islam (and the modernism of its prevalent urban architecture) are habitually highlighted by more traditional and by more postmodern minded Muslim critics (e.g. Ahmed, 1992: 206ff.).

Administrative and economic modernisation can also be seen as functional in further undermining Bedouin traditionalism and thus as an ally in the project of a rationalised and purified Islam, in which the urbanisation process was designed to disrupt nomadic patterns of social cohesion (Akers, 2001: 9). The advent of consumerism in the last decades, however, presents a completely new challenge. Against the intuitive expectation that consumerism will simply shift the balance between Islamic time and Western time in favour of the latter we will argue that it challenges the linear rationalities of both, and even has the potential to form a, say, unholy alliance with the social time of the tribes against the holy alliance between theological and technological times. However, their ways part where consumerism urges a radical individualisation of time which is at odds with the collectivism of traditional time.

This paper examines some conflicts and confluences of national-secular/global clock time, religious Islamic time and social time of the tribes with the individualised times of the consumer. We are drawing on empirical research conducted by Theeb Aldossry in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam from 2010 to 2011. The study consisted of ethnographic observations in various sites of consumption (shopping malls, boutiques and corner stores) and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 29 heads of households in their homes. The interviewees were male and between 45 and 50 years old. As the field researcher is male, it was not possible, due to cultural restrictions, to carry out interviews with women. As there were strong indications of a transformation of the role of women due to, among other things, the consumerisation of Saudi society there is a strong case for research among Saudi women in the future. For a further discussion of the study’s methodology and its restrictions, see Aldossry (2012).

We now will first outline how the dominance of Islamic time was asserted while Western clock time and calendar were accommodated in Saudi Arabia, both at the expense of traditional regimes of time. We will then present an argument that, while industrial clock time was easily assimilated, the new Western import of consumerism presents a much more difficult challenge to the maintenance of Islamic time regimes, partly because it allies itself with traditional Arabian attitudes towards time. In the final section, we will show that this alliance cannot hold as the individualism of consumer time with its hyper-flexible sociality also undermines what is left of the segmental, but still ritualised, and kinship-centred traditional understanding of time.

Islamic, Western and traditional time in Saudi Arabia

In Saudi Arabia the year is structured according to the Islamic lunar calendar. The holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha mark turning points of religious significance. Eid al-Fitr is the festival of breaking the fast at the end of Ramadan, finishing what arguably is the most holy month in the Islamic calendar. At Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, the readiness of Ibrahim to sacrifice his first-born son Ismail, and the latter’s willingness to die on God’s command are remembered by repeating the sacrificial substitution reported in the holy books of the Abrahamic faiths. The contemporary Islamic doctrine distinguishes itself from the Judeo-Christian tradition where the demanded sacrifice is Isaac, not Ismail. It also locates the event near Mecca (on the mountain al-Marwah) where it connects to another important month in the Islamic calendar, Dhu al-Hijjah which, as the name indicates, is the month of the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. With its role during the Hajj the sacrifice creates a spatio-temporal linkage synchronising the activities of Muslims globally (Bowen, 2012: 76f.). In doing so, importantly from a Saudi perspective, it confirms the holy sites of which the Kingdom is the guardian as centre point not only for the participants in the Hajj, but all Muslims. By relating to a story about the pre-Mosaic era the rhythm of the passing years is anchored in the deep past. It also relates to one of the central moral dilemmas in all monotheistic religions – the question of familial love and loyalty and relations among humans in general on the one hand and the absolute submission to God on the other. In this sense, it can be seen as a central ritual event in the Islamic year connecting moral teachings to a time that is, as it were, beyond time, fusing history and permanence (see Halbwachs, 1975: 188).

While such fusion of social order, collective memory and transcendence culminate in the two major festivities, it reverberates throughout the year in a calendar leading up to them. As mentioned the months to which the two central turning points are located are also significant in themselves. The holy month of Ramadan induces a complete restructuring of daily (and nightly) activity, and the four days of the Hajj during Dhu al Hijjah are not only of religious significance, but also require a huge administrative effort and are accompanied by intense economic activity around the passage of masses of pilgrims from around the globe through the holy city of Mecca – linking, as mentioned, a geography which centres on the Arabian Peninsula with the structure of time. This geographical centredness of time on the holy sites is affirmed in the direction of the ritual prayer, the salat, towards Mecca. This geography includes a spiritual cosmography as well which often finds expression in the design of the sajjadah (prayer rug). Like the organisation of the year, the organisation of the day follows a religious pattern, and the structuring points are the five obligatory salawat, which again are directly linked to astronomical observation – in this case the position of the Sun relative to the horizon.

An indicator of just how taken for granted a measure for social time this constitutes is the fact that it is still common to agree to meet, for example, ‘right after morning prayer’. Our own interview transcripts also specify the time of meeting in relation to prayer times. Islamic time thus interconnects and synchronises interactional time, social time and biographical/historical time in a consistent way that links to a transcendent holy cosmos and makes it relevant for everyday life (cf. Luckmann, 1991).

Unlike the Gregorian calendar and unlike clock time, the Islamic calendar and daily prayer times are organised not primarily on a numerical sequence derived from astronomy but on ongoing astronomical observation (the new month starts when the new moon is sighted, the first prayer is at sunrise). This anchoring in the movements of the created cosmos ties the sequentialisation of time to God as creator – particularly since the Islamic concept of time is an occasionalist one in which continuity of motion is produced by the divine creation of every single moment, so that the continuous existence of objects and the coherence of movement (including human action) is only an appearance in which identical or similar states are created in successive moments. The temporality of the world thus testifies to the permanent involvement of God in everything (Böwering, 1997: 60).

This persistent link to creation/nature is a pronounced difference to the now globally dominant Gregorian calendar. The latter, too, is based on astronomical observations of the movements of the Earth around the Sun and around itself, but as Elias (1984: 187) has pointed out, the perfection of the mechanical and now electronic simulation of those movements has increasingly shaded out that link. This is time which now runs by itself, independently, and is now commonly felt as the standard against which all movements are measured, from that of cars (miles per hour) to that of industrial processes (the 8 h day) to that of the stars themselves. We no longer intuitively think of 12 o’clock as defined by the zenith of the Sun, but would say that the Sun reaches its highest point at noon.

Both the Gregorian calendar and clock time are in use in the KSA – especially where industrial, business, military, scientific, etc. processes need to be tuned according to their own logic and, even more pressingly, tied into globalised interactions. This is made possible by the fact that the Gregorian calendar has been secularised in the sense that is no longer defined by Christian festivals (and Easter, the highest holiday, is timed by reference to the position of the Moon anyway). It becomes a possible outside reference frame – but of course one that needs to be contained as such if it is not to surpass the Islamic time frame.

As calendars are also being deeply intertwined with power in that the rhythm of life of the rulers are superimposed on that of the ruled (Gell, 1992: 306), this is also a question of political identity. Nations as social constructs are ‘embedded in secular, serial time’ (Andersen, 2006: 205) which is ‘homogeneous’ and ‘empty’ (2006: 202) and thus can easily receive the narrative contents that make the collective memory constitutive of nationhood. To fill that temporal void by asserting the dominance of Islamic time in the KSA must also be seen as part of the assertion of the legitimacy of the monarchy. Vis-à-vis the more secular nation states in the Islamic world and in particular vis-à-vis pan-Arab nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s the political identity of the KSA as a separate nation state is founded substantially on its role as guardian of the Muslim holy sites. Al-Fahd (2005: 385f. esp. footnote 44) points out that the emphasis on the Islamic holidays in the Basic Law is by no means a triviality but central in the affirmation of the Islamic identity of the Kingdom. The controversy around the introduction of the National Day of the Saudi-Arabian Kingdom set on the 23rd September commemorating the foundation of the state in 1932 has to be understood against this background. Linking the national celebration to the international Gregorian calendar has been interpreted by some conservative religious scholars and commentators as a step towards secularisation. While the Gregorian calendar now appears relatively neutral it still stands for a Eurocentric focus of globalisation processes. It is derived from the Julian calendar whose authority was established by the Roman Empire. And linear world is time tuned to the authority of the clock at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich – an authority established in 1884 firmly by the then dominance of the British Empire over the oceans (Zerubavel, 1982: 13) which still is inscribed in London’s post-Imperial urban geography (Driver and Gilbert, 1998: 24). The political pre-history of the now dominant global time zoning system has been invisibilised by an emphasis on its pragmatic uses, but it is not entirely forgotten.

It has often been pointed out that opening towards global market, adopting high technology and modern administrative structures requires continuous adjustment and containment. For Elmusa (1997), the spread of clock time into everyday contexts around work and business is an indicator for a creeping process of secularisation – although at least some 20 years ago he saw this process as incomplete when measured by Western standards of time–money efficiency since even though the ‘macro-pattern of the country’s public affairs is based on the clock (e.g., work and school hours, radio and television programming) […], punctuality as value, as “money” as “efficiency,” has not been fully internalized in individual consciousness’ (Elmusa, 1997: 353).

One could conclude that with further efficiency gains Western time will push back the use of Islamic time to religiously significant practices. But to simply contrast Islamic and Western time, as Elmusa does, in a unilinear modernisation discourse misses one key issue: traditional mentalities and attitudes to cooperation, hierarchy and the time frames in which they are enacted. Here is a fairly typical complaint of a modernising administrator-to-be at the onset of the accelerated phase of development from the 1970s onwards:

One of the most conspicuous results of an agency’s overstaffing is that many members of its staff may have little or no work to do. This fact, coupled with the general attitude of people towards time has turned many government offices into play-grounds. The problem is not only that attendance and conformity of employees to the official work-schedule depends on the personal relation between superiors and subordinates, but also basically that employees are more inclined to waste time, whether because of their apathetic attitudes towards work in general or because of the lack of adequate workloads. Talking to a colleague, reading a newspaper, drinking tea and coffee and/or lobbying for a personal interest are the main daily activities of many government employees. (Al-Awaji, 1971: 223)

Task time here is a problem because the tasks to be fulfilled in modern administration are no longer intuitively urgent as they are no longer part of personal relations of trust and commitment, neither are they enforced by a hostile natural environment.

The establishment of Islamic time as dominant frame of reference, which from a Western perspective is often portrayed as traditionalism in the face of economic and technological globalisation and uniform world time was in fact a rationalisation and modernisation when set against the traditional Arab and particularly Bedouin time. The latter was determined by the necessities of nomadic life in the desert and by the requirements of tribal social relations. Both of them are not easily reconciled with the Islamic concept of time, which is an urban one (Fabietti, 2000). The task time of the desert – and the desert is an unforgiving taskmaster (e.g. Cole, 1975) – does not heed to religious requirements. When water and food are scarce and difficult to store, a requirement like fasting during the month of Ramadan is hard to follow. The desert also does not echo the soundscape of an Islamic city (Nelson, 1993: 216). In the city prayer times can be heard by the calls of the muezzins (nowadays mostly transmitted by the tannoys of the mosques, see Elmusa, 1997: 350) and during Ramadan drummers go round to wake you up in time for a last meal before sunrise. The time of the desert is also defined by the nature of social contact within and between groups (e.g. Nippa, 2006). A chance visitor may trigger a ceremonial generous round of coffees and this is a requirement that the Bedouin household must always be prepared for (Cole, 1975: 148) – it does not follow regulated time regimes (be they Western or Islamic).

In principle this can be tolerated – and over the centuries it has been tolerated – under Islamic law which allows for compromise in the following of Islamic rules where it cannot be avoided. People with a chronic back problem do not have to follow the exact movements of the ritual prayer (they can perform them in their mind). Sick persons do not have to fast during Ramadan (they can catch up on fasting once they have recovered). Muslims living in the desert have to follow the rules as well as they can – but they are not required to risk their lives and also won’t be held responsible for a certain inexactness in the timing of their prayers. An Islamic ruler, however, has the responsibility to enable Muslims to follow the Law by removing, as far as possible, conflicts with other necessities. This has been one (maybe the main) of the justifications for the settlement programmes that were designed to in effect urbanise the Bedouins – and thereby both to modernise and Islamise them (Fabietti, 2000). Turner has observed that, indeed, the rule-focused Islam favoured by the Saudi authorities does connect very well to rationalising modernity understood in a Weberian sense (Turner, 1994).

The idea that Islamic time and Western time are irreconcilable opposites may have been furthered by the way that later Islamist revolutionaries have made symbolic use of their insistence on the Islamic calendar to position themselves against Western domination. Zerubavel highlights Khomeini’s despair about what he saw as a nightmarish servitude of Muslims to European time, citing it as prominent example ‘of a quest to defy standardization and universalism and preserve particularistic sentiments by maintaining uniquely distinct sociotemporal arrangements’ (Zerubavel, 1982: 19). But one has to see that not only are there important ideological differences between those two Islamic revolutions, but also in what they identified as main adversaries. While Khomeini’s Islamic revolution was directed first and foremost against a highly Westernised dictatorship (and then against rival revolutionaries with a secular socialist world view), the Saudi Islamic revolution was directed primarily against tribal structures and folk-religious Islam. In the long run Iranian Islamism proved just as modernist in that it fully embraced technological rationalism and very easily translates the two time systems into each other where it is pragmatically required.

Another reason that Western and Islamic times appear incompatible is of course the aforementioned Turkish path to modernity in which the Islamic calendar was thrown out alongside the caliphate, the Arabic script, Ottoman dress and sharia law. But interestingly, Islamic time persisted in Turkey nestled within the European time and date system. Studying pious villagers in Western Turkey Kimberly Hart (2013: 45ff.) found that secular and religious times were firmly integrated. Omnipresent (Gregorian) calendars cross-referenced Islamic festivities and prayer times while asserting the European pattern as the officially valid measuring stick. The supremacy of the Gregorian calendar and clock time in education, administration and employment did not invalidate the orientation by prayer calls in agricultural work, family life and religious practice. In fact, the everyday negotiation of the two systems allows villagers to adapt in more versatile ways to different contexts. ³ For example, as Hart (2013: 48) notes, to go by prayer calls can be more adequate in a non-industrialised agricultural context because prayer times are in tune with local and seasonal patterns of daylight. In contrast, in internationally zoned clock time ‘with the exception of a single meridian within each time zone, there is always at least some discrepancy between standard clock time and actual solar time’ (Zerubavel, 1982: 19). Being bi-temporal therefore can be advantageous in getting localised and nationalised (and now also globalised) practices into tune.

Being a formalised system of measurement, Islamic time is, as mentioned, easily translated into Western time and vice versa and thereby facilitates coordinating agricultural task times and religiously informed social practices with practices in the formal economy and administration that go by the clock. This is an important difference to traditional, non-codified time keeping.

Unlike in the Turkish case, of course, in Saudi Arabia the supremacy of Islamic time is firmly upheld. But in the end it does not make a huge difference which system encapsulates and integrates which as long as mutual convertibility is secured. Both approaches share that they integrate religious practice into the clock-timed productive, commercial and administrative interactions in large-scale nation states. Both are concerned with the substitution of, from a modernist perspective, disorderly and chaotic traditional structures by order created using standard measures. Like the national currency in commodity and labour markets, nationalised and convertible units of time make practices commensurable from the household level up to the national level. The national yard stick of the national time zone (Arabian Standard Time or UTC-3) can, for example, be used to compare local prayer times in relation to distant ones. If someone in Dammam wants to know whether they can call a pious friend in Jeddah (about 750 miles to the West) they can easily obtain a translation of Jeddah prayer times into nationalised clock time and adjust their call accordingly. The same does not apply to the task time of the desert and the social time of tribal life. Today technological means of synchronisation are easily available. Prayer times can be checked through a simple app on a smart phone – just as there are apps to dermine the correct qiblah, i.e. the spatial orientation of prayers towards Mecca. Even though Islamic time and world time cannot be translated into each other by a linear calculation, they are both rational in the sense that they are not dictated by immediate experience but by astronomical observation. So while some conflict is unavoidable, working plans, travel arrangements, meetings, etc. can be scheduled in a way that minimises collisions with the exercise of religious duties.

Far-reaching urbanisation which has been made possible by the rapid technological and economic development that followed the oil wealth therefore was, as mentioned above, welcomed not only by modernisers keen to build up a working nation state and an industrial economy but also by Islamic reformers. It has, to an extent, removed conflicts between Islamic time and traditional Arab task and custom times by integrating them in or submitting them to the Islamic time frame. It did lead into new conflicts with a world time according to which the international markets, the air travel schedules, and indeed the oil producing industries tick. One could say that the harsh realities of the desert that disturbed the Islamic time rhythm have been replaced by the harsh realities of global capitalism, its booms and busts, as the new task master. But the standardised linearity of world time, unlike the ups and downs of measures of economic value, at least provides a framework into which those vagaries can be charted.

So overall, there is no fundamental opposition between Islamic time and Western time if by ‘Islamic time’ we strictly refer to the rationalised astronomical time keeping that structures orthodox religious practice and exclude folk-religious elements. As Turner (1994: 78) points out, ‘against Weber and his followers, Islam was perfectly compatible with the modernization project involving, as it did, a high degree of secularization of traditional religious cultures …’ Modern timing is not a fundamental threat to Islamic time and Islam is not an obstacle to modernisation. This changes with the transition into the age of consumer capitalism that is captured under the title of ‘postmodernity’. As Turner continues, such postmodernity

threatens to deconstruct religious messages into mere fairy tales and to destroy the everyday world by the challenge of cultural diversity. The problem of cultural perspectivism is an effect of the pluralization of life-worlds brought about by the spread of a diversified, global system of consumption. (Turner, 1994: 78)

Collisions between Islamic time and the times of consumer imagination

Consumerism in Saudi Arabia is allowed to develop in the in-between spaces which remain outside the regulative provisions of religious law. As Jafari and Süerdem (2014) argue, by very precisely delineating religious times, Islamic Law also creates secular times. They argue that this makes space for practices of consumption, allows for pleasure-seeking behaviour that is relatively unburdened and uncontrolled by religious duty. In Saudi Arabia, where the interpretation of rules on decency and modesty are quite strict, there may be more restrictions on how that secular time can be used than in more liberal Muslim societies, but at least within the confines of the home (i.e. outside the public sphere) and outside religiously defined times, there is a ‘time of the consumer’, a time and space for hedonistic pursuits. Outside the home shopping malls, as a new private/public realm, have come to provide spaces to within which religiously (and also administratively and industrially) non-defined time can be used at leisure.

However, because this time is defined (negatively) as non-religious, there are, among religious leaders, anxieties around what appears to be the religious side of consumer culture. The objections are not so much about Veblenian luxury consumption, even though concerns are voiced about excesses and overspending, but ‘romantic’ consumerism (as defined by Campbell (1987)). The pursuit of quasi-spiritual consumer transcendence and self-transformation arouses strong suspicion. In our study we found, for example, that the expressive side of youth culture is seen as potentially anti-Islamic and often met with suppression. The collision is epitomised by the moral panic that arose around Valentine’s Day. The fact that modern celebrations such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and birthdays have spread among young men and women is seen as problematic by religious authorities. This is partly owing to the strains of expenditure that come with such events (the expectation of presents), although it is often pointed out in newspapers and magazines that they are still cheaper than traditional celebrations, e.g. around Eid. More significant are the cultural implications. Although they could be seen as mere fashions that come and go, they stand in for greater socio-cultural shifts. For example, what is celebrated at a birthday party is the existence of the individual as such – which in turn can be seen as affirmation of Western individualism. Also, on Mother’s Day the (again: Western) nuclear family is celebrated and on Valentine’s Day a Hollywood notion of romantic love while also making apparent reference to a Christian saint. Valentine's Day provokes particularly strong reactions as flowers, teddy bears and jewellery are exchanged mainly among unmarried young people – transgressing the strict application of gender separation. The religious establishments are trying to close flower stores to prevent such contact between the sexes (Aldossry, 2012: 250).

What is at stake in all those cases is purity and order. They all concern mixing – the mixing of theologies, the mixing of the secular and the religious, the mixing of the sexes. It is also about the mixing of times. The shopping mall iconically embodies such mixing, being a potentially supra-religious or para-religious institution which competes with rationalised time frames – secular ones as well as religious ones. Analysing malls as from a religious studies perspective, Zepp (1997: 108ff.) observes how they generate their own ritual time structures. Like postmodern architecture freely recombines elements and vistas from historically incompatible styles, so the postmodern timing of the mall uses secular-national, religious, personal/private and commercial occasions to assemble its own time structures.

We have said this happens in the in-between spaces which are neither occupied by religious nor work obligations, but given how malls mix up the various time frames a slow inversion can be sensed in which the times of the consumer no longer inhabit the interstices of official times but encapsulate them. As Backes (1997: 5) argues, the shopping mall

carves a fresh and ahistorical space from the drab monotony of contemporary life via the totalitarian opulence of its inside passageways. The intention and effect of the mall space are to liberate us from both the quotidian and the past.

In the mall, therefore, the consumer may be allowed to reverse what de Certeau (1980: 21) calls the ‘victory of space over time’ which propriety amounts to. In the ‘strategic’ mode applied by modern planning and administration an appropriate place is assigned to different practices (the home, to the mosque, to the office, etc.) and that spatially enforces a sequentialisation which divides time. In the mall the contraction of private and public spaces and religious and secular times reverses that sequentialisation to accommodate the tactical rather than strategic nature of the consumer. Those tactical orientations of the consumers, the bargain hunt and the openness to seduction by the display of goods, defies the discipline of deferred gratification in expectation of greater wealth in the future – it defies a discipline that parallels religious discipline and sacrifice in expectation of salvation. As one family father from Jeddah describes the undermining effects on rational planning by the lure of the mall:

You can see amazing things, yes you would go there or you would be surprised that you find a discount on some things and increases on some goods, but you will buy them anyway because once we arrive we cannot change our minds.

One materialisation of time that was omnipresent in our interviewees’ accounts of consumer practices – and in fact on their body – was the wristwatch. And here it was intriguing that, while ‘quality’ was an issue in choosing the right watch, quality did not seem to refer to precision or time keeping in general. The central function of the watch was to impress – Veblenian conspicuous consumption. That the watch takes such a central place in Saudi conspicuous consumption (second only, maybe, to the car) is intriguing given that clock time and the industrial discipline it is related to (Thompson, 1967) does not hold a similar ideological place in Saudi Arabia as it does, say, in the USA (Elmusa, 1997: 353). Particularly, if the watch is not so much used as an instrument to measure time (in fact, in the age of the smartphone it is largely redundant) its function as adornment can be seen mainly in the way it connects the individual wearer with general value. As Georg Simmel (1908: 280) in his classical analysis of adornment points out, adornment enlarges the individual by stylistic reference to something supra-individual that reaches out to everybody else. In the ownership of an expensive (or expensive-looking) time piece the consumer asserts mastery over disciplining clock time to which the worker is a slave. A watch can be seen as a shackle to the system of employment, reminding the wearer that part of his time is not his own. But an expensive watch also represents the owner as someone who has money at his disposal and that money, in Adam Smith's (1848: 29) version of the labour value theory, in turn represents his command over the working time of others incorporated in the commodities he can buy. As such, in the mainly extraction-based economy of Saudi Arabia which can afford to contract out high-tech industrial development, the omnipresence of the prestigious wristwatch may not represent an ascending authority of clock time which would undermine Islamic time. It looks more like a claim to consumptive mastery of that time and thus connects to a utopia which comes closest to realisation in the collapse of historical time in the shopping mall.

The paradoxical relation of secular (national/global) clock time, Islamic (local/universal) prayer time and the (individual) time of the consumer is iconically summarised in the architecture of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent mall.

The Abraj al Bait hotel and mall complex located very close to the Masjid al Haram – the mosque containing the Kaaba – constitutes an instance of such mixing close to the holiest site of Islam. On its tower it sports a giant clock face (said to be the largest in the world), framed by assertions of Islamic and national identity: Above the clock there is a takbeer (i.e. the assertion that God is greatest) and below are changing displays of religious messages and assertions, e.g. a basmallah (i.e. the invocation of the name of God the Most-Gracious and Merciful). On the clock face itself there is the secular national emblem of the KSA (two crossed swords under a palm tree). This fusion of Islamic and national symbolism and clock time decorates a building containing five-star hotels and a five-story shopping mall, i.e. a site of hyper-consumption, whose outer walls (combining aesthetic elements of early 20th century New York skyscrapers and Arabian sacral architecture) thus mark a boundary between the structure of rational time (Islamic and national-secular) and time of the consumer.

The ensemble of holy site and mosque, national symbol and overbearing consumerist structure is not unique – it can be found in many places, e.g. in the way the 1880 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II was built as a massive consumerist counterpoint to the equally massive Cathedral of Milan to create a confluence of as well as a contrast between religion, nation and commerce. It is a tried and tested pattern of containment. This boundary integrates the time of the consumer into the wider orders of both religious practice which safeguards national unity (and makes a claim to its validity beyond national borders) and integration in clock-timed global economic processes, containing the subversive potential of consumer individualism to both.

But in the marking of such boundaries, of course, the threat of subversion keeps being represented as well: Consumerist individualistic pleasure seeking is delineated from the holy sites – but it is also there for all to see.

Consumerist ‘fun’ is experienced as threat by those interested in maintaining and/or establishing order from its inception in early 20th century America and Europe (Cross, 1993) to its spread in late 20th/early 21st century Middle East (Bayat, 2010: 137ff.). Anxieties revolve particularly around youth culture whose more deviant varieties are seen as representing the vanishing points of the socially corrosive effects of consumerism. The image of the young man who is more interested in football and cars (and in women and alcohol) than in prayers and work is that of a disorderly man deviating from the image of the smart, healthy ‘clean cut’ orderly man that is shared by all modern ideologies (Mosse, 1996: 180), which includes the rationalist interpretation of Islam dominant in the KSA – one of our interviewees, for example, lamented that the Afro hairstyles inspired by former football star Majed Abdullah are resurfacing.

So what is kept in place (and kept within temporal limits) by the boundary marking around sites of consumption still evokes anxieties – anxieties that seem to find their confirmation in the existence of deviant youth cultures such as the joy-rider subculture researched by Al-Otaibi and Menoret (2010). Here marginalised young men, instead of seeking belonging and structure in the pursuit of Islamic practice build up their own time structures in ritualised displays of automotive prowess using stolen cars. The organisation of competitions and shows establishes independent temporal structures that respect neither clock nor prayer. Al-Otaibi and Menoret (2010: 90) note that to an extent this can be interpreted not only as subversion of religious, political and economic order but also as harking back to the Bedouin competitive tribalism of the days of the desert. Linking up with pre-Islamic poetry these youngsters create their own rooting in a mythical past while the vehicle stealing has its precedent in the inter-tribal camel stealing as honourable sportsman-like small-scale warfare.

Given such visions of disintegration, it becomes clear what balancing act the integration of consumerism into religious and secular-national order constitutes. Consumerist individualisation is noted to increase subjective freedom and to suggest complete dependence on the market at every level of social intercourse; it means learning how to cope with paradoxical demands on behaviour to control one’s affects and yet to be natural to use the opportunities of informalisation (Berking, 1999: 147). In Luckmann’s (1991) terms this threatens to undermine the way that individually experienced time, interactional time and historical time is integrated within a religious/cosmic frame. In terms of time frames, individualised celebrations pierce the religious calendar with rhythms and pauses that are asynchronous to the life of the religiously instituted community and nation and put emphasis on social relation that are outside the reach of religious rules.

As we will see, this also is seen to undermine traditional kinship relations. But in one aspect traditional and consumer timing coincide and threaten to undermine the rationalising advances of Islamisation of time. Islamic holidays are being infused with excessive hospitality and competitive generosity that goes far beyond that which is recommended by Islamic clerics and scholars. The massively increased purchasing power of households after the oil boom and the availability of high-end consumer goods of all kinds means that the traditional Arab obligation to hospitality and the competitive strain of Bedouin culture (already mentioned above) are no longer held in check by the limited means of desert life. Many of our interviewees underlined that they are in outright fear of divine punishment over the way that religious holidays have become festivals of conspicuous consumption – confirming Rojek’s (2000) suspicion that, if anywhere at all, Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption and emulation probably only holds in Saudi Arabia. While the religious timing itself is not undermined its meaning may well be affected and concerns have been voiced that Eid al-Fitr may turn into a Muslim Christmas, i.e. a festival for family over-consumption, and thereby lose both its religious and national focus. Also, weddings which are non-calendric and kinship-centred foci of gift exchanges, regain importance and compete with religious festivals. Modernisation had weakened tribal and kinship ties, increasing distance between kinship members by urbanisation and internal migration while at the same time limiting the once wide-ranging spatial mobilities of nomadic life. Modern urban planning also meant that kinship networks that used to dwell together in compounds are broken up into nuclear family units allowing for much more autonomy and independence. Altorki and Cole (1989: 208) report on the shift from traditional family forms to nuclear family patterns after the oil boom and give a vivid picture of the conflicts and reorientations involved. The emerging hyper-consumerism now means that universal car ownership and the ubiquity of electronic means of communication allow for a reinvigorated focus on kinship networks. So in many ways the timing of consumerism and the time of traditional life combine in a challenge to the dominance of Islamic time and with it order as such.

Collisions between consumer time and traditional time

But there are also tensions within that unholy alliance. The individualistic potential of a consumer culture in which the indeterminate nature of money relates to universal choice competes with the demands of family and kin. This is not only a matter of spending decisions, but of time itself. The schedule for the Champions League may not only collide with prayer times. It also may be ignored by relatives expecting to be visited or expecting hospitality when turning up unannounced.

The official line of technological and economic modernisation paired with cultural conservatism. Since the experience of colonialism is framed as conflict between Islam and Christianity that resulted in the economic and cultural dominance of the West, Saudis tend to view the West with suspicion and even fear. As one interviewee said ‘Nothing good ever comes from the West’. The belief that ‘the West’ has plans to destroy the Arabs and Muslims is quite widespread in media discourse. But it is not just the fact that there is more information available, which can be interpreted in many different ways, but also how it is made available that is an issue. The technology itself is individualising (Aldossry, 2012: 283ff.).

This has been seen as highly problematic, especially in light of the high value that is placed, in Saudi society, on the unity of family relations. Technological devices and gadgets do not just convey information, sounds and images but they create individualised virtual spaces into which the user can dive, blanking out the surrounding world, affording separated lives under one roof. The sense that not only is there more plurality within wider society, but even within the family has become an urgent cause of concern for many. This further deepens the rift between a culture of globalised consumerist media and the beliefs prevalent in older generations and conservatives who fear for both the integrity of the traditional family structure and overall the foundations of Saudi identity. New forms of communication affect how traditional kinship relationships are affirmed. For example, visits to festivities and events have been traded in for exchanging holiday messages via social media. These behaviours, some conservatives believe, are the first step down a slippery slope that will fundamentally change the identity of the community, draining it of both its social and religious meaning – while for many families it is simply an easier way to communicate as much as possible with relatives in a more complex world where they no longer live closely together.

That this is pertinently a problem that is experienced in terms of time becomes clear in views like this observation by one of our interviewees:

You can feel one family living under one roof, and their hearts are different. It is possible to see four people sitting, like my children, and everyone has room and a private world. That means one is playing PlayStation, the second is playing an electronic game, the third is browsing the news, and the fourth is watching YouTube.

Conclusion

What we have here is a case where the ownership of free time is contested between the desires of the individualist consumer and the entitlements of his family network.

If we accept the negative definition of ‘leisure’ as ‘non-work’ or time outside paid working hours we find that in Saudi Arabia it is divided between three fields: the religious, the traditional and the consumerist. With the Islamic reforms introduced after the establishment of the KSA, traditional task time (both in relation to nature and to kinship) was subjected to the structure of Islamic time rhythms and thereby rationalised. There is a constant effort to synchronise these rhythms with those of the global market to fit activities into the times outside the clearly delineated sacred times of prayer, fasting and celebrating. But outside these sacred times there is not only time for free leisure, but the demands of traditional timing are still intact and compete with individual attempts to carve out ‘me-time’.