An enormous flexible canopy of photovoltaic cells will shade the pavilions at Dubai’s 2020 expo, an innovative step towards greater energy efficiency for the international event, but critics warn that the workers slated to build the necessary infrastructure stand to suffer the most.
Westerners may be confused about Middle Eastern customs and how people, men especially, use the ‘squat’ toilet. How we “go” impacts our environment: sit down toilets, and toilet paper consume more resources.
I have received the inquiry below from a Westerner dating a Saudi: ‘I noticed my Saudi boyfriend sits down on the toilet either to urinate or defecate and usually in the West men stand while urinating. I have been too embarrassed to ask him why he does that.’
Here is the answer from my vantage point.
Typically, Saudis pray five times a day, and in order for this praying to be accepted, one has to be fully cleaned in terms of the body and cloths. This is why Saudis are raised in a way that encourages them to care about the cleanness of their body and cloths.
Before praying (five times a day), Saudis clean all the parts of their body that are exposed and uncovered (hands, feet and face). It’s called wudu or wudhu. (And yes, you can do wudu sustainably). Saudis always maintain the cleanness of their body, and this is why they sit down while urinating or defecating and, moreover, wash with water their privates.
So, Saudis sit down on the toilet either to urinate or defecate and usually in the West men stand while urinating.
So, Saudis have been raised to maintain a high level of cleanness, which has therefore become part of their character and which might not be understood by their Western partner.
This implies that a Saudi might take a shower after having sex not necessarily because of ideological reasons but because the way s/he has been raised encourages him/her to keep their body cleaned all the time. This also implies that the Saudi skin is used to be exposed to so much water and therefore is less sensitive to it.
It should be mentioned that, in England, for example, it is cold most of the time, and therefore washing with water one’s private after defecating makes this area wet.
In other words, this area does not get dry easily in such a cold weather of England. So, in England, washing with water one’s private after defecating is not a fun experience! Despite this, Saudis living in England still do so.
Yet, in England, toilets do not offer water, which is therefore a problem for Saudis.
Saudis, however, go around this problem by taking a bottle of water with them to the toilet to wash their private after urinating. So, this is clearly a political issue, with some kind of tension between the beliefs of Saudis and the structure of the English toilet.
That is, the structure of the English toilet imposes certain values on Saudis, whereas the beliefs of Saudis encourage them to go around this structure.
Guess who might be the culprit carrying a new SARS-like virus to people in the Middle East?
With the global village getting smaller every day, it starts to become inconceivable that our access to the Internet and local phone calls require a complicated network and chip change every time we cross borders. A new chip, developed by Israeli engineers hopes to change that.Â
The Arabian Gulf has waters that are some of the world’s most saline; and where water temperatures often reach as high as 35 degrees Celsius during the hot summer months. Despite these harsh realities, the waters of the Gulf contain a variety of aquatic plants and animals.
A day late and an undergarment short! The morning after Thanksgiving, I read about a new stress-busting bra that could’ve kept me from, once again, approaching turkey-day as a competitive eating event.
Jordan is pushing ahead with the largest commercial scale wind farm in the Middle East region, the Tafila Wind Farm, seemingly without care for the massive bird migration population that passes through Jordan twice a year. Green Prophet called Israel’s Bird King, bird migration specialist Prof. Yossi Leshem.
With no appreciable amounts of oil or natural gas, Jordan, like Syria is a Middle East anomaly when it comes to its fossil fuel rich neighbours like Saudi Arabia and Israel. But new energy is blowing into Jordan.
Some people talk about change and others actually make it. At the TEDx Hiriya event held yesterday at the Recycling Park, nine leading Arab and Jewish Israelis gathered to showcase social change in action.
Last week, the Gaza Strip and its zoo witnessed the unprecedented birth of two African lion cubs at the Beesan Zoo, a facility in the northern part of the densely populated Strip that was built and opened by the Islamist Hamas movement. But just three days later, the cubs died, from unknown causes.
Tetra Pak sold roughly 1.625 billion packages in Egypt in 2011, of which only 20 percent were recycled. That’s a lot of untreated waste, but now the company has pledged $340,000 to boost the country’s recycling capacity. They want to make their business more sustainable.Â
Israelis are well known for being industrious – especially when it comes to turning innocuous every day materials such as tomato cans, or in Naama Arad’s case, paper into beautiful works of art.
It’s that frying time of the year again.
Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights which lasts for eight days. The holiday commemorates the victory of the Jewish people against Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 165 B.C, and the restoration of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, which had been ransacked and desecrated.
The light in the Temple, which was to burn through every night, had been put out. The sealed vessels of consecrated olive oil for the light had been opened and defiled. But one unbroken vessel of pure olive oil, enough to burn for only one day, was discovered among the wreckage. It miraculously burned for eight days, until a new supply of oil was pressed.
So the tradition of eating fried foods on Hanukkah began, which Jews all over the world gladly observe. Traditional savory pancakes like potato latkehs are a familiar treat. Sweet sufganiyot donuts appear in all the markets and bakeries. But we overlook the significance of the fried goodies. It’s really all about the olive oil. So we offer this healthy, herby, version of zucchini fritters, from the wonderful Delights From The Garden of Eden cookbook, by Nawal Nasrallah (author of Dates).
And while the author’s intention wasn’t to celebrate Hanukkah, there is another traditional Hanukkah food in this recipe: cheese.
Efforts to find solutions to Cairo Egypt’s mounting garbage problems have ranged from allowing hundreds of thousands of pigs to eat the city’s organic wastes’ to using rag pickers to sort through the mountains of garbage that have accumulated.
Israel, being on the “land bridge” that links it with Africa and Asia Minor, has always been well known for a number of biblical fruits. These include: the multi-seed pomegranates, grapes from which superb wines are now made; and of course several varieties of dates and olives. Another iconic fruit, although not native, comes from the genus opuntia and is known as the prickly pear or “Sabra” cactus.
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