Saudi Arabia

Introduction

Saudi Arabia is a large Arab state in Western Asia. The official language is Arabic.

Learn more about Saudi Arabia

Culture and Religion

Culture

• Muslim culture is collective; in collective societies the value of harmony and maintaining the collective structure is more important than the autonomy of the self; therefore, adults continue to be emotionally and socially dependent on their family or tribe.

• Students who are in the United States tend to go to places where other family members have either lived or still live; this may explain why there are “pockets” of Saudis in certain locations.

Religion

• 100% of Saudis are Muslim. Not all Muslims are practicing. There is a large expatriate community of various faiths (more than 30% of the population). Most forms of public religious expression inconsistent with the government-sanctioned interpretation of Sunni Islam are restricted. Non-Muslims are not allowed the have Saudi citizenship and non-Muslim places of worship are not permitted.

• Islam was born in Saudi Arabia and thus Saudi Arabia is visited by millions of Muslims every year.

• Among certain obligations for Muslims are to pray five times a day - at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, and evening. Friday is the Muslim holy day, making the weekend Thursday and Friday.

• During the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims may choose to fast from dawn to dusk and are only permitted to work six hours per day. Fasting includes no eating, drinking, cigarette smoking, or gum chewing. Children, women who are menstruating, pregant, or breastfeeding, people who are sick, and some people with disabilities are exempt from fasting. Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic lunar calendar, and thus takes places on different dates each year on the Gregorian Calendar, which is used in the U.S. It extends from a point in mid-August to mid-September.

Family Systems

• Women keep their father's last name their whole lives, and thus family lineage (tribes or clans) can be traced back thousands of years to a specific geographic location.

• Saudis often feel motivated to behave honorably in order to not bring shame to the family name.

• Fertility rates have dropped from 7.02 children per woman in 1980-1985, to the current rate of 2.17 children per woman.

• Families tend to be patriarchal, with the father in the family appearing as the authoritarian figure.

• According to Islamic law, men are allowed to marry up to four women. Saudi Arabia saw a decline in polygyny practices, but may now be seeing an increase as part of an Islamic revival.

Women in Saudi Arabia

• Women often live in privacy from men outside of their family, and when in public are well-covered by the abaya, a cloak covering the whole body except for the face, feet, and hands. A veil for the face, called a niqab, may also be worn. Women may choose to wear the full facial veil, although not all women in Saudi Arabia make this choice. Some may choose to cover only their hair.

• In the conservative provinces, cultural change or medical understanding may not be keeping up with improvements in primary healthcare, so a woman who produces one child with a disability may produce more and more in the hope of producing a healthy child.

• Guardianship laws: Women need permission from their male guardian (a male family member, usually a father or husband) to do things such as travel outside of the country, open a bank account, conduct official business, and undergo certain medical procedures.

• Currently, women cannot obtain driver’s licenses. Driving protests have occurred, where women have driven throughout cities, and traffic departments have been sued.

• For many years, women and girls were banned from participating in sports within the kingdom. In 2013, the first women’s sports center was opened, and in the same year, girls were given permission to practice sports in private schools.

• General education is required for all Saudi children, male and female. Today, women make up over half of the college and university student populations. They attend all major universities including female only colleges and universities. Although women make up approximately 60% of this student population, the work force in Saudi Arabia is only about 20% female.

• In public places, men often accompany women.

• In September 2011, King Abdullah granted women the right to vote and run for seats on the Shura council. Women will be able to vote for the first time in the 2015 election cycle.

Immigration

• According to a 2010 Center for Immigration Studies survey, there were 42,904 Saudi immigrants living in the U.S.

• The Saudi Arabian student population in the U.S. has increased significantly in recent years, due largely to the Saudi Scholarship Program, which was created by the Saudi government in 2005. When the program first began, there were 6,000 students studying in the U.S. In 2013 there were more than 70,000 students.

• In 2012, Portland State University’s Saudi student population was 500, with an additional 200 students taking English language courses. Read the article “Here in America,” which discusses the experiences of female students from Saudi Arabia who are studying at Portland State University.

• Life in the U.S. may be unsettling at first, for female students especially, who may not be used to mixed-gender classes, living on their own, interacting with strangers, or the informal manners of Americans. In the article "Here in America" (link above) Saudi women living in Portland reported that they had not previously done laundy or written checks, and that they had to learn to do everything for themselves.

Education

Primary and Secondary Education:

• Saudi Arabia’s education system has changed dramatically since the country was founded. In the beginning, education was a privilege for children from wealthy families. Now, it is available for all children, in all tiers of society, and the government pays for schooling. The curriculum is a mix of traditional Islamic religious education, and lessons that are based on ones in schools in the United States and the United Kingdom.

• General education consists of kindergarten, six years of primary school, three years of intermediate school, and then high school. After intermediate school, students choose to attend high schools with emphasis on commerce, the arts and sciences, or vocational schools. National schools at this level are not co-educational. These levels of education are required for all Saudis, both male and female. The Qur’an emphasizes the importance of learning.

• A major goal in Saudi Arabia is to eliminate illiteracy. A 2011 estimate of literacy for the total population was 87.2% (90.8% male, 82.2% female).

Higher Education:

• There are currently twenty-four universities in Saudi Arabia, many of which were established in a short period of time. There are also many private colleges, community colleges that are affiliated with universities, and women’s colleges.

• There are an estimated six million students enrolled in Saudi schools and universities.

• Students receive free education, books, and health services. Students who are studying abroad as part of the Saudi Scholarship Program receive tuition, health care, housing stipends, and annual round-trip airline tickets back to Saudi Arabia from the Saudi government.

• Women today make up more than half of the Saudi student population. Women attend all major universities including female only colleges and women’s private universities.

Special Education:

People with disabilties did not receive education services until 1958, when schools for the blind were first opened. In 1962 the Ministry of Education founded the Department of Special Learning. This created a movement to improve special education services and to educatate teaching professionals on special education.

Following are three laws on disability and short descriptions of each:

• Legislation of Disability: This passed in 1987 and was the first legislation for people with disabilities in Saudi Arabia. It “guarentees individuals with disabilities rights equal to those of other people in society.” It also “defines disabilities and describe programs for prevention and intervention and procedures of assessment and diagnosis to determine eligibility for special education services” and “requires that public agencies must provide rehabilitation services and training programs that support independent living.”

• Disability Code: This passed in 2000 and indicates that people with disabilities must have access to free and appropriate medical, physcological, social, educational and rehabilitation services through public agencies.

• Regulations of Special Education Programs and Institutes (RSEPI): This was written in 2001 after Saudi representatives, who hold master’s and doctoral degrees in special education from the United States, reviewed the Handicapped Children Act of 1975 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990. The RSEPI was modeled after those two U.S. policies. The RSEPI defines students with disabilties and describes tasks for professionals who work the students. It also describes an IEP, prcedures for assessment and education, and free and appropriate education policies.

Alquraini (2011) described different special education settings that are typical in Saudi Arabia:

• Students with “mild learning disabilities” receive their education in typical classrooms in the general education setting with support with special educators and some modifications.

• Students who have “mild and moderate cognitive disabilities” receive their education in separate classrooms in public schools. They may share time with typically developing peers in non-curricular activities. These students will attend primary (elementary) school until thirteen or fourteen, and intermediate (middle) school through age eighteen but often do not have the option of attending high school. Students may have the option of attending vocational programs.

• According to the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia in 2008, 96% of their students with “multiple and severe disabilities” received their education in separate institutions. In these settings, students do not interact with typically developing peers. The institutions provide residence, food, financial aid, and personal assistance. Students reside at school during the week and go home for the weekends. Distance between families’ homes and the institutions may be far, so families often do not take their children there each day.

Healthcare

• Healthcare services in Saudi Arabia have been given high priority by the government in recent decades and have expanded significantly. The Ministry of Health is the major government provider and financer of healthcare services. In accordance with the Saudi constitution, the government provides all citizens and expatriates working within the public sector with full and free access to all public health care services.

• The government is facing financial burdens due to an increasing population and free of charge services. A cooperative health insurance program has been planned and is slowly being implemented in stages. Currently, the first stage is being implemented. This stage is applied to non-Saudis and Saudis in the private sector, in which their employers must pay for their healthcare costs.

• Until the 1980s, healthcare in Saudi Arabia was largely curative, as it focused on treating existing health problems. The Saudi Ministry of Health decided to develop preventative healthcare services by adopting a primary healthcare approach. Many primary healthcare centers were opened and the approach aimed to educate the population on current health problems and ways of preventing and controlling them, provide adequate supplies of safe water and basic sanitation, promote proper nutrition, provide comprehensive maternal and child healthcare, immunize children against major communicable diseases, prevent and control local diseases, treat common diseases and injuries, and provide essential drugs.

• Currently, close to 100% of Saudi children receive vaccinations for common diseases. The infant mortality rate has declined significantly from 68 in 1,000 births in 1980, to 18 in 1,000 in 2003. The under-five mortality rate fell from 250 per 1,000 births in 1960 to twenty per 1,000 births in 2009.

• Life Expectancy: 74.82 years

• In 1991 the Jeddah Institute for Speech and Hearing (JISH) was established. JISH adopted the ASHA standards of clinical practice. According to the mission statement, JISH has the goal of providing the same quality of speech and hearing services that children have recieved in the U.S.To achieve this, JISH recruited professors from the U.S. and canada to set up clinics and supervise the Saudi student clinicians who were recruited from universities across Saudi Arabia. The field of speech-language pathology and audiology has grown significantly since 1991, when the JISH founder reports that there were no speech therapists to be found.

Saudi Dialects

• Arabic is the official language of Saudi Arabia. English is widely spoken, and it is used frequently in business, and is a compulsory second language in schools.

• Gulf Arabic is the dialect of Arabic spoken in United Arab Emirates (Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, etc.), The State of Kuwait, The Kingdom of Bahrain, The State of Qatar, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, most of Southern Iraq and to a lesser extent The Sultanate of Oman

• There are many similar sounds between English and Gulf Arabic; differences include velar, pharyngeal, and glottal sounds, both voiced and unvoiced, that are not produced in English

• Literary Arabic, also called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), which is used in the press, on TV, radio, etc. and in governmental official proceedings, is not spoken colloquially by Gulf Arabs. In day-to-day affairs, Gulf Arabs use their mother tongue - Gulf Arabic.

• This website includes audio recordings of each of the consonant sounds in Gulf Arabic, including some descriptions of how to make them

• While communicating on the Internet, Arabic speakers may use the Arabic Chat Alphabet to better represent the speech sounds, which cannot be represented with the letters found on the qwerty keyboard.

Implications for the Speech-Language Pathologist and Things to Consider

Useful Arabic Clinical Phrases for the SLP

• Gender mixing between patients and professionals may be a stress for patients. For example, male patients generally prefer male practitioners. Females also may prefer male practitioners, except for care regarding pregnancy and gynecological needs, where a female practitioner will be prefered or required by a patient.

• Female patients may decline to be alone in a room with a male clinician.

• Intervention among Eastern clients should take into consideration the strong interconnectedness between adolescents and their families.

• Counseling in Eastern cultures is expected to take into account the familial relationship in the process and promote a balance between the client’s self-actualization and harmony within the family.

• Plan extra time for meetings with families, as they may want to spend time getting to know you.

• Be considerate of proxemics (e.g. arms touching, standing closer) when meeting with families and be sure not to immediately interpret differences in proxemics as impaired pragmatics.

• Male clinicians should be particularly sensitive to an Arab woman's expectation of privacy and personal space - for example, it may be considered highly inappropriate for a man to initiate shaking hands with a woman.

• Consider that males are not supposed to look at a woman who is not covered, which may result in a lack of eye contact.

• People from more rural areas tend to have more conservative views.

• Male professionals may be expected to speak directly to the male family member and not to the female.

• Access the ASHA Leader article "What SLPs Need to Know when Working with Muslim Clients."

Greetings:

• When meeting and greeting in Saudi Arabia, it is typical for close male counterparts to shake hands and kiss on each cheek.

• When meeting under more formal circumstances, a handshake between members of the same sex is fine. Women and men often will not shake hands in public. It is advisable to follow the man's lead when you are not sure.

• Use your right hand when engaging in a handshake, as the left hand is considered unclean.

• Each person present will be greeted individually, and it is expected that you do the same. You should expect to undertake a considerable amount of small talk, and learning a few Arabic greetings would be well received.

• Saudis may stand closer to each other than many westerners are used to, and members of the same sex will often touch arms when postulating or emphasizing a point. You should not draw away from this as it would be considered rude and rejecting.

• Be aware that due to the conservative nature of Saudi Arabian society, it may not considered proper etiquette for men and women to greet each other in public.

• Punctuality is appreciated but not crucial.

• Saudis prefer to work with people they know and trust and will spend a great deal of time on the getting-to-know-you part of relationship building. You should be patient.

• Saudis may judge you on appearances; dress and present yourself well.